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Hello,
Our users noticed a change when viewing PDFs in their SharePoint Online document library. Occurred Monday 4/8/24.
They have it set up where when you click on the document from the library, it brings it up with the SharePoint Online PDF Viewer, it does not open in a new tab, and that's the way we prefer. With the viewer, you can click on the info button to bring up the info pane on the right, and you can edit your metadata from there.
They noticed several things.
-The background is now black, like in a dark mode, thats what initially tipped them off that something has changed.
-The info button is no longer available, it is now buried in the ... menu on the top left.
-It is now EXTERMELY slow to load. When they click on the next arrow to view the next PDF, it is very slow to load and also the info pane is very slow to load.
-When they filter or sort the library, and then start viewing the PDFs, it does not bring them up in the same order as the filter/sort. It's completely different.
I as the IT admin, have tried many things to improve performance, here's some notes.
-Not everyone has this new viewer experience. The older experience has a white background, and also the info button. See screenshots to see the difference.
-I am able to reproduce the slowness on other test pcs, though there are a few that seem to load fine.
-I have cleared browser cache, cookies
-Tried with different user accounts
-Tried with private browsers, and tried with Edge Firefox, and Chrome.
-Tried using a hotspot to be on a different network
I have opened up a ticket to Microsoft, but no response yet. I have also not seen any announcement of this change.
Has anyone else noticed this? Any workarounds or suggestions? Any way to roll back to the old viewer? (wishful thinking). I'm wondering if laptop specs are factoring in, which would surprise me because it's basically just web browsing here.
Thanks!
nick
A group of Microsoft Products and technologies used for sharing and managing content, knowledge, and applications.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Yes - experiencing the same issue as you describe, only recently happened once update to the 'dark mode'
Hi, would be great to get insights in your workaround. Seems that Microsoft caused the problem, support doesn't know about the roll-out of the new version and asks for log-files ... and nobody from Microsoft has an idea how to fix it.
I'd be very pleased if we could help ourselves.
Hello @Juergen,
Unfortunately, I had the same experience with Microsoft Support. I felt like I was being fooled, and since Emanuele didn't get back to me either, I had to build a workaround solution with the PDFViewer in PowerApps myself. It's not perfect, but at least we can work again. If you would like, I can show you how I built it, just let me know.
Hi guys,
having the same issues as you describe here ... and pretty frustrated after discussing with MS support since several weeks ... and getting asked for more logfiles every day ... TrackingID#2405311420001773
Seems the support team has never heard of a roll out of a new version.
Problem 1: the info button is the most used button ... and not visible in the main menu any more
Problem 2: performance
Problem 3: when pressing "edit all" our corporate Power App doesn't open any more ... which makes our entire Sharepoint Workflow completely useless!
And the most critical problem:
The "black" update was installed user by user in our company without getting asked and without control for me as an Admin ... and nobody can tell me how to switch off the new black version immediately as is blocks our company since several weeks!
@Emanuele happy to get a super fast solution on this! How can we switch off the black "beta" version immediately?
Not specifically related to performance, but saw a lot of replies mentioned other issues, so thought I'd add the below.
We are getting some very inconsistent behavior depending on where we open the files from.
Also, not sure if related (seems like it is based on timing), but we are getting a lot of users across the business over the last month saying that when they used to click on links to documents from Quick Links or a Library webpart on the SharePoint page, etc. it would take you back to the page when you closed the PDF. Now, it redirects you do the source library the PDF is located. This is a major issue for us. We have links on pages to documents that live on different sites, and we absolutely don't want our users being redirected to those libraries after closing the PDF.