Adobe PDF plugin a no show - PDFs handled by Safari?

Question

Even though the AdobePDFViewer.plugin is in the Internet Plug-ins folder and is up to date, PDFs in Safari seem to be handled differently. You get them open with a floating dingus with 2 zooms, a save to download button, and a view in Preview button. I have my PDFs set to open in Adobe Reader and when I press that button they open in Adobe Reader and not Preview. And the floating dingus the second time sometimes appears, sometimes not. Sometimes it only appears if you click and move the mouse over the bottom of the window. Sometimes clicking the window and moving around anywhere works. Very odd.

Answer 1

I don't know how my experience will compare to yours, as our environments are quite a bit different.
Using a G4 PPC running OS 10.4.11, I found Safari will load PDFs in a browser window much faster without the Adobe Plug-in.
For example, if I use Safari to open:
http://www.flu.gov/professional/business/smallbiz.pdf
with the Adobe PDF browser plug-in, it takes about 70 seconds on my machine. (If downloaded, this is a 3.7MB file.)
But after removing the AdobePDFViewer.plugin from my Library>Internet Plug-Ins folder, the same page loads in Safari in about 22 seconds - much better, but still far from great.
With a so-so DSL connection, I generally find it to be faster to download the PDF file and open it with either Adobe Reader or Preview, rather than trying to view it within a Safari window.
If anyone knows of a faster way to open PDFs within Safari, I would love to hear about it.
(BTW, I've already tried the "PDF Browser Plugin" from Schubert|it and it's no faster than Safari's native handling of PDFs - plus my scroll wheel won't work - and, if you're running 10.6 it won't work right, either.)