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
    2024-04-11T19:53:15+00:00

    I forgot my screenshots.

    Old

    new

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-04-26T14:31:50+00:00

    Please upvote this so that Microsoft will fix the issue: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/4385eef6-bc01-ef11-a73d-6045bd841c15

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-05-15T21:11:13+00:00

    This is a planned 'upgrade' One Drive Feature ID: 381752 - OneDrive: Updates to file viewer

    Lots of broken JS in this. As far as i can tell, they are abandoning some of the broken features completely in favor of the '50% faster' opening speed. I hope everyone is doing support tickets to Microsoft on this.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-04-12T15:18:56+00:00

    Another issue was found with the new experience. When you sort or filter the library and then click on a PDF to launch the viewer, the viewer does not retain the same order or items as the filtered/sorted list. My users say the old experience had no issues with this.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-05-16T19:04:36+00:00

    This is a planned 'upgrade' One Drive Feature ID: 381752 - OneDrive: Updates to file viewer

    Lots of broken JS in this. As far as i can tell, they are abandoning some of the broken features completely in favor of the '50% faster' opening speed. I hope everyone is doing support tickets to Microsoft on this.

    Thank you for noticing this is likely feature 381752. Scheduled rollout started in March, which lines up. I told several Microsoft people at the M365 community conference a few weeks ago about this issue and that I couldn't find any roadmap about changes to Sharepoint or the PDF viewer. I did not think to look for the OneDrive roadmap. This issue follows user accounts, not devices, so we can use everything just fine with the old experience, then log in with a different user, and suddenly experience the slowness and filter issues described throughout this thread. We will continue pushing on Microsoft Support, and ask that you all do the same to get this issue visible to them. I imagine there is finger pointing between the OneDrive and SharePoint teams right now. This feature rollout is clearly botched, and needs to be stopped and rolled back until they can figure out what is going on and fix their issues.

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