Get SVG In Firefox

If you have Firefox 1.5, you can already view SVG content on the web. Isn't that great? If you're having trouble with a page that uses SVG but doesn't show up correctly or doesn't show up at all in Firefox, it may be that the author didn't try it out on Firefox or that Firefox doesn't support some SVG features that they need. Many of the SVG sites that are up today were developed with the Adobe SVG Viewer in mind. The Adobe SVG Viewer for Windows is made to run on Internet Explorer or Firefox. If you want to view a site that was made for Adobe SVG Viewer but it doesn't work properly in Firefox 1.5, you can still install the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin and get the best of both worlds.

How to use SVG that doesn't work in Firefox

Adobe SVG Viewer 3.03 is available from this link.

Adobe SVG Viewer 6.0 preview 1 is available from here. This one is a beta release, but it seems to work well.

When installing the viewer for Firefox (and perhaps other Mozilla browsers) on Windows the installation instructions are slightly more difficult, and the 6.0 preview 1 plugin must be used instead of the stable version 3.03.

1. Download the installer for the 6.0 preview 1 version of Adobe's SVG viewer from here. (You want the link at the bottom that says "Win 98 - XP")
2. Run the installer (either find SVGView.exe where you saved it or click "Open" in the Firefox "Downloads" window).
3. Now for the lousy part, copy NPSVG6.dll and NPSVG6.zip from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins. I've assumed default install paths for both of the programs here.
4. All that's left is to restart Firefox and browse to a test page

How to help everyone else out

Now that you've got your problem fixed, you should also contact the website owner and let them know that some of their visitors aren't able to use their SVG pages.

Often the reason that SVG doesn't work in Firefox is that it's not written the right way. Technically that would mean it's not 'valid' SVG. In these cases Firefox will sometimes just give you a yellow screen with red letters and a strange error message.

Other times there might be some features that the page uses which Firefox doesn't support. Some features of SVG are optional so Firefox isn't really doing anything wrong in that regard. It can be confusing for us as users though. If you want to see what Firefox does and doesn't support, they publish this information here.