CDF Player is a Computable Document Format viewer developed by Wolfram Research. The proprietary CDF Player is released with a restrictive license, which can be downloaded free of charge from Wolfram Research. In contrast to static formats such as PDF and pre-generated interactive content provided by formats such as Adobe Flash the CDF Player contains an entire runtime library of Mathematica allowing document content to be generated in response to user interaction using any algorithms or visualizations which can be described in Mathematica. This makes it suitable for scientific, engineering and other technical content and digital textbooks.
CDF reader support is available for Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Linux but not for e-book readers or tablets. The reader supports a plugin mode for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari, which allows CDF content to be embedded inline in HTML pages.