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Modern browsers are platforms for modern apps and especially for communication apps, because the Internet is primarily about communications and browsers haven't

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.

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.