SharePoint Online PDF Viewer changed and performs very slowly now

Anonymous
2024-04-11T19:26:20+00:00

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

Microsoft 365 and Office | SharePoint | For business | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T21:07:41+00:00

    Hello my friend

    I am happy and sad to have found your message, unfortunately I have the same problem as you, this problem was reported to microsoft the first days of May, the case already went through the Power Apps support team and today is under review by the Sharepoint team with no solution at this time.

    To clarify, when you click on edit all basically nothing happens right? it is as if you did not click on the "button".

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T18:31:46+00:00

    Hi Emanuele,

    First, I want to thank you for reaching out directly. It goes a long way in showing that you care about the product and customer service. I can confirm the new viewer is functional enough for us. Reading through the comments, I see the update situation is still somewhat fluid. It would be useful to have a detail/incident report on this update and/or issues as we do with other things in the admin center.

    We are functional again though and that's what counts. I thank you for your team's efforts and look forward continued improvements.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T16:45:47+00:00

    Overall, load times seem much faster in my experience, both when uploading files to SharePoint and navigating between them.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T16:44:22+00:00

    Hi Emanuele,

    I have confirmed with my team that the sort issues look to be resolved. And the speed issue is improving, but still not as fast as the original experience.

    But there is another related issue that they encounter daily. They are times where the viewer will randomly switch to a different PDF. They are not entering in metadata, or toggling between files, or clicking anywhere. They simply have the file up on their screen as a reference, and then when they look over, it will be displaying a different PDF. When this happens, it always seems to go back to the same file.

    Has anyone else seem this behavior before? This started happening after they got switched over to the new dark mode experience.

    Thanks!
    nick

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-05-23T16:32:00+00:00

    Hi Hagan,

    We are looking at other ways to pass the information about the number of files in the folder. We removed because often users not familiar with the file viewer could not understand what those numbers were.

    We received enough feedback about the info button, we are considering re-surfacing it in the main toolbar.

    Best,

    Emanuele

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