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
    2024-05-23T16:32:00+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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  2. Anonymous
    2024-05-22T21:18:49+00:00

    Hello Daniel,

    We temporarily deprioritized the keyboard shortcuts, but rest assured, they will be reintroduced. We appreciate your patience as we work on bringing them back.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-05-22T19:39:43+00:00

    Hi John,

    I am the product manager for the file viewer I apologize for this, we found an issue with the search and filter functionality that was affecting the file viewer. We deployed a solution that should fix the problem but let us know if you are still experiencing any issues.

    Best,

    Emanuele

    Hi Emanuele,

    Thanks for your post, definitely encouraging to read. How long until we can expect the update to be deployed throughout all tenants? Just anecdotally, I still have the issue in our tenant.

    As a side-note, I'm a bit perplexed about this incident, impacting multiple customers, not being mentioned anywhere in the M365 Admin Center as an active incident. We have a SEV A ticket since last week, and your post is the first sign of movement at all on this.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-22T14:53:54+00:00

    Added my comment to yours. Hope others will do the same.

    https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/e3556b08-4518-ef11-989b-000d3a05ece8

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-05-22T13:51:40+00:00

    If you're an admin in your tenant, you could open a ticket from admin app Serviceanforderungen - Microsoft 365 admin center more tickets will receive higher prio for MS devs to fix this. Aldready did from my side.

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