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A PDF viewer only renders content of a file, and it's okay and good. A browser is not merely an HTML viewer, it should also render other files like plain text,

by gkya 10y ago

A PDF viewer only renders content of a file, and it's okay and good. A browser is not merely an HTML viewer, it should also render other files like plain text, images, videos etc. Hello is a service for video-conferencing, has nothing to do with rendering content. Pocket is another wart that I hate in Firefox (though it's a useful service, I was a paid user for a while). Pocket is no content rendering and it's external service, so is Hello. Many use Chromium instead of Chrome because the Google Services.

lucb1e 10y ago
Providing a simple front-end for WebRTC, which is a core browser component, makes enough sense from a conceptual standpoint. Of course we now all know how it turned out, but I think the non-constructive criticism that many give is a bit misplaced.
bad_user 10y ago
Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps and especially for communication apps, because the Internet is primarily about communications and browsers haven't been about rendering content for a long time now. Consider: Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Hangouts, Google Inbox, Fastmail, web.whatsapp.com and web.skype.com. You can make an argument that Firefox should stay neutral. But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome. For one because you can't find decent builds, unless you're on Linux, but also because people that don't want Chrome because of Google's services probably use Firefox, because Chromium is still integrated with Google (Web Store, Sync), while providing a poor experience (no PDF viewer, no Flash, no DRM, or any other proprietary bits). Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody.
- magicalist 10y ago
  > Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody. Humorously, this wasn't the best choice of examples for your point. Chromium displays PDFs just fine because they open sourced their PDF viewer over two years ago :) https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/ https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Ah, didn't know about it, nice.
- gkya 10y ago
  > Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps I'm completely fine with this (although I don't like JS webapps myself, if they're anything more than a thin client), just that I don't want my platform to come with unremovable third party stuff. Further more, while being a "platform for apps", browsers are still content viewers where sometimes content happens to be an interactive application software. > But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome. I said many as in "a multitude of people", not to mean "most". My version of Chromium has a PDF viewer, and I didn't install it (Chromium 52.0.2743.116, from FreeBSD pkg).
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Another commenter informed me that the PDF viewer is now open-source. It wasn't last time I tried Chromium, but it must have been 2-3 years since then.
threatofrain 10y ago
I think that Firefox's move to include Pocket was a sensible idea, I just wish they baked their own solution like Safari did. Safari's read-it-later / readability features make sense for the subset of users who browse for prose content and want the text nicely formatted for reading. I think the primary nuisance of Pocket was in making users have another relationship to a 3rd party. Credentials and another service to think about.
- gkya 10y ago
  I believe Pocket was included for money. Otherwise it's trivial to implement a similar app, given many OSS libs for content extraction exist: - goose (scala) - python-goose (python port of the above) - apache tika (java) - boilerpipe (java) - boilerpipy (python, not a port of the above) - libextract (python) - beautiful soup (python)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by gkya 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago

Providing a simple front-end for WebRTC, which is a core browser component, makes enough sense from a conceptual standpoint. Of course we now all know how it turned out, but I think the non-constructive criticism that many give is a bit misplaced.

bad_user 10y ago

Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps and especially for communication apps, because the Internet is primarily about communications and browsers haven't been about rendering content for a long time now. Consider: Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Hangouts, Google Inbox, Fastmail, web.whatsapp.com and web.skype.com. You can make an argument that Firefox should stay neutral. But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome. For one because you can't find decent builds, unless you're on Linux, but also because people that don't want Chrome because of Google's services probably use Firefox, because Chromium is still integrated with Google (Web Store, Sync), while providing a poor experience (no PDF viewer, no Flash, no DRM, or any other proprietary bits). Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody.

magicalist 10y ago
> Good thing that PDF.js, the PDF viewer from Firefox, ended up on Chrome's Web Store, so you can add it to Chromium. Which is the main difference between Mozilla and its competition: when Mozilla improves Firefox, it tends to benefit everybody. Humorously, this wasn't the best choice of examples for your point. Chromium displays PDFs just fine because they open sourced their PDF viewer over two years ago :) https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/ https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/
- bad_user 10y ago
  Ah, didn't know about it, nice.
gkya 10y ago
> Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps I'm completely fine with this (although I don't like JS webapps myself, if they're anything more than a thin client), just that I don't want my platform to come with unremovable third party stuff. Further more, while being a "platform for apps", browsers are still content viewers where sometimes content happens to be an interactive application software. > But I don't believe that many use Chromium instead of Chrome. I said many as in "a multitude of people", not to mean "most". My version of Chromium has a PDF viewer, and I didn't install it (Chromium 52.0.2743.116, from FreeBSD pkg).
- bad_user 10y ago
  Another commenter informed me that the PDF viewer is now open-source. It wasn't last time I tried Chromium, but it must have been 2-3 years since then.

threatofrain 10y ago

I think that Firefox's move to include Pocket was a sensible idea, I just wish they baked their own solution like Safari did. Safari's read-it-later / readability features make sense for the subset of users who browse for prose content and want the text nicely formatted for reading. I think the primary nuisance of Pocket was in making users have another relationship to a 3rd party. Credentials and another service to think about.

gkya 10y ago
I believe Pocket was included for money. Otherwise it's trivial to implement a similar app, given many OSS libs for content extraction exist: - goose (scala) - python-goose (python port of the above) - apache tika (java) - boilerpipe (java) - boilerpipy (python, not a port of the above) - libextract (python) - beautiful soup (python)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]