17 ms·

Firefox: Announcing Project Mortar

186 points by lmedinas 10y ago

wodenokoto 10y ago
I think this is bad news. I really like that pdf's in firefox is just another webpage. This means that all my plugins and other HTML-shenanigans can be used on pdf's. This also appears to be a step away from Mozillas strategy of web-technologies everywhere.
- jamesgeck0 10y ago
  While I also appreciate Mozilla's browser renderer, PDFs really aren't web technology. If it's a question of constrained resources, I'd prefer Mozilla focus their energy on improving HTML-shenanigans overall, not maintaining a PDF rendering application.
  - wodenokoto 10y ago
    I fail to see how they are so constrained. They have more money than ever, and have just dropped Firefox OS, which - all things equal - should free up a lot of developers.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      For how long? Sure they have a deal with Yahoo (Verizon?) that could fund them for some time. When that deal runs its course what do they have to bargain with? Their market share is currently in the single digits on the desktop and they have virtually no market share on mobile which increasingly is more relevant than the desktop in terms of usage. It's smart for them to decrease costs and maintenance burden right now while they still have the resources.
      - makomk 10y ago
        I'd like to use them on mobile, mainly because ads are so absolutely obnoxious on there, but their user interface isn't that great and seems to be the one place they haven't copied Chrome.
      - wodenokoto 10y ago
        Desktop usage is still around 15% according to statcounter. They are ~7% across devices. Firefox for Android has become really good, and I prefer it to Chrome, but my impression is that mobile users are very unlikely to stray from their default browser, even if it is just the blue globe "internet"
        floatboth 10y ago
        well, until those users want to block ads...
    - the8472 10y ago
      other things they have put thunderbird and parts of the addon system in maintenance mode. Various other less frequently used browser features have been discontinued too. So there has been some fat-cutting going on for a while now.
    - bzbarsky 10y ago
      Care to hazard a guess at the number of people at Google working on Chrome or at Microsoft working on Edge? Last I checked both were bigger than the number Mozilla has working on Firefox. And yes, the people who were working on Firefox OS are now working on other things, and we _still_ don't have enough people to cover all the things that need doing...
    - petecox 10y ago
      pdf.js and B2G cancellation were probably linked in that one justification for a pure JS renderer was to display PDFs on Firefox OS.
  - syshum 10y ago
    They might as well adopt blink. Make Firefox a Chromium Clone/Fork and call it a day, that seems to be what they want.
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
      > that seems to be what they want It doesn't seem that way, considering all of the effort they've put into Servo.
      - Amezarak 10y ago
        They've also put a lot of effort into looking and acting more like Chrome. I killed auto update on Firefox when they added search suggestions more like chrome because it broke my workflow. People had complained about the ui being made more like chrome, features being dropped to be more like chrome, etc., for a while. Then you have the deprecation of the Firefox extension model in favor of, essentially, chrome's. It is harder and harder to see how Firefox stands out on its own as opposed to being a chrome imitator. This is just the latest example. If they think they can sell Firefox based on a free and open web instead of based on power user features, a great extension ecosystem, or whatever, I can only say...good luck. I don't know many projects that have succeeded outside a small core of users based on ideology. Servo may be the distant future of Firefox. But I am becoming increasingly pessimistic that Firefox will even make it to that future, which I feel awful about. I don't understand what mozillas leadership is doing.
        kuschku 10y ago
        > I don't understand what mozillas leadership is doing. Desperately trying to get back to two-digit marketshare? Trying to compete, as the last major open browser, against all the corporate browsers?
        alphapapa 10y ago
        Trying, yes. But the method they have chosen is to abandon what made Firefox popular in the first place and imitate Chrome. So why not just use Chrome? IOW, they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg by trying to transform it into a duck. But if I wanted a duck, I'd already have a duck. I guess they're blaming Chrome for their lost market share rather than blaming themselves for mismanaging their product. So instead of fixing their mismanagement, they're just trying to copy Chrome. They used to be leaders (without Mozilla, Chrome probably wouldn't exist as it does today), but now the leader has become the follower. And who needs another follower? Another perspective is that the Web has "grown up" since 1998. Back then the percentage of Web users who were "power users" (remember, empowering users was the mission back then; "Take back the web!") was much higher--but the raw number was still enough to be fruitful. Since then, half the planet is on the Internet, and the percentage of them that are power users is much lower. The raw number is surely much higher still, but that's not enough for Mozilla--they've got to appeal to the masses to get the percentages. All the loyal users who've been with Mozilla for nearly two decades? They can switch to...uh...Pale Moon, I guess. Mozilla just wants the noobs, because that supposedly brings in the most money. I hate to say it, but Mozilla needs to die so it can be reborn--again. Every so often, the tree of browser needs to be cleansed with the blood of layoffs--something like that. Then their successors can focus on making a good browser instead of chasing more millions.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Oh jesus christ. The entire ML thread is bad news. Why on earth would they move away from PDF.js (which is a fantastic project) and then use that move to justify Mortar? Also, I just learned this from the thread: Why the fuck would they kill Shumway? I'm all for killing Flash, but Shumway is an important tool not just for migration, it's also really important for archival. God damn it Mozilla. I've talked about this before, too: Hearing Mozilla executives, each Mozfest, talk about commitment to the free web. Commitment to open technologies. What commitment, exactly? In a handful of years, Mozilla has managed to severely damage its poster child web browser's reputation by including then subsequently dropping drm, by including then subsequently dropping Hello (a good initiative with a horrible user experience), by completely screwing up the launch of Pocket (which they could only have done by massively misunderstanding their userbase). In that same handful of years, Mozilla took some good initiatives, such as Persona and Firefox OS, completely botched marketing and experience on both, severely underestimated the required efforts on the latter, then dropped both projects. In that same handful of years, Mozilla dropped support for its second poster child, Thunderbird, arguably the last decent FOSS email client. It all screams mismanagement and I haven't even talked about half of the problems. I've been upset about all this for some time but now writing it all out I'm starting to wonder of Mozilla isn't just in a free fall. PS: I 100% understand the concerns and difficulties of allocating development time but this is a pattern I keep seeing with Mozilla: Spin up a project, get it to 80%, give up. You could build a castle with the amount of efforts wasted on projects either doomed from the beginning (FxOs), or dropped near the finish line. This is all absurd.
  - fdej 10y ago
    Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallback, but considering how important PDF files are, looking for a better solution makes sense.
    - eridius 10y ago
      Agreed. As an OS X user, I hate it any time a browser or website uses something like PDF.js instead of the native PDF support. The native PDF support in OS X is fast and excellent.
- serge2k 10y ago
  I don't particularly like the idea of mozilla bringing in this from chrome just to cut costs. Just feels like a step towards chrome further dominating.
  - petecox 10y ago
    They're deprecating XUL and the NPAPI plugin architecture so that they can move to servo relatively legacy free. Importing Chrome's SWF and PDF is a way to stress test their new plugin implementation. Not maintaining pdf.js seems a budgeting decision but Flash is restoring functionality to Linux via a cross-browser plugin, which Adobe had abandoned for Chrome only.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  OTOH, this means more focus on things like Rust, Servo, Gecko improvements, and JS engine optimizations (to say nothing of implementing ES6 and beyond).
jasonkostempski 10y ago
Why not just drop Flash and PDF support? Flash is dead and PDFs never needed to be rendered in browsers in the first place, they can already be opened through free, cross-platform, open source programs with all the features on the goal list.
- jamesgeck0 10y ago
  A few popular sites in the US still require Flash, Hulu is one of them. If Mozilla drops in-browser PDF support, I think it would make them the only major browser with no support?
  - lbenes 10y ago
    CBS.com requires flash and has lots of great content such as "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert". Also one of my banks requires Flash for online check deposit. If Firefox dropped flash, I'd drop Firefox.
    - cpeterso 10y ago
      HBO Go video requires Flash, too.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      I suggest you drop that bank.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  As a counterpoint I love pdf support in the browser. People post pdf versions of most documents, papers, and presentations and viewing them in the browser makes the overall experience so much better! I actually have chrome as my default pdf viewer because it starts up faster than most other pdf viewers and I'm more used to it.
  - derefr 10y ago
    I've never understood why you even needed a browser plugin to do this. Why can't the browser just spawn a PDF viewer-app's COM server or equivalent, and then hand it a rendering context and send UI events back and forth—all without even knowing what exactly the filetype it's embedding is? Which is to say, whatever happened to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding ?
oridecon 10y ago
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project > The core of the Windows sandbox is Google's chromium sandbox. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 Any more components that are coming directly from Chromium? This is an interesting move if it allows Mozilla to focus on Servo and the new Rust components. At least I hope that's what they are doing, after the recent Firefox OS news.
- the8472 10y ago
  The IPC mechanism used for electrolysis was adapted from chrome
LaSombra 10y ago
I would love to see Chrome/Chromium adopting PDF.js, from Mozilla.
- lbenes 10y ago
  I routinely have to open large spec sheets for work. Have you ever tried to open any large documents with PDF.js? Chrome's pdf plugin can handle 100+ page documents with ease, while Firefox's PDF.js can make the entire browser unresponsive. Hopefully e10s will finally fix this.
- nwah1 10y ago
  Agreed. PDF.js and multi-process both have room for improvement, but the security benefit is huge. Ideally, NPAPI and Pepper should both die, but I don't necessarily mind them killing NPAPI and adding this minimal set of Pepper support for Flash. Pepper crashes the browser less (though most of the fault lies with Flash). But even if this enables PDFium, it should not be adopted, and the talk of adopting it makes me want to oppose the whole idea of "project mortar."
- rcthompson 10y ago
  I haven't used Chrome in a while, but I seem to remember being able to use pdf.js in Chrome by installing an extension.
  - yohui 10y ago
    Yes, it is available as an extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...
    - rhelmer 10y ago
      I managed to get this working as a WebExtension in Firefox (mostly just hacking around a few APIs that aren't ready in Firefox yet). Could be a path forward for folks that want to keep using pdf.js perhaps.
mmmeff 10y ago
Desktop URL: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.planning/j834iDIG3yY/V84Rzw0cEAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.planning/j...
cddotdotslash 10y ago
This post has the tone of an organization gasping for relevance: the constant references to cost cutting, focusing on a core component, etc.
- creshal 10y ago
  If only they could finally decide what this mystical core component is and stick with it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
caiob 10y ago
I know nearly nothing about browser development, but I'm curious to learn as to why Mozilla spends so much time on a PDF renderer?
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  The PDF.js projects have 2 major scopes: Give Firefox and the broader web a cross-platform, free, opensource PDF-renderer (you can use it to embed PDF in webpages) Give Mozilla real-world experience with bottle-necks in their PDF-renderer.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    Given Mozilla's recent banging on about "core products" and "cost cutting", I'm a bit amazed that a PDF renderer isn't considered out of scope. It seems like another tacked-on feature (with necessarily inclusive bugs, security holes, etc) to the browser that is better handled by external applications that everyone already has.
    - jamesgeck0 10y ago
      It is considered out of scope. That's why they're looking at embedding a 3rd party PDF renderer.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        Which is a fine pithy answer, but does nothing to address the concerns about maintainability, bugs, etc. Any modern system can read PDFs. Why does it need to be in the browser, instead of handed off to the app of the user's choosing?
        petecox 10y ago
        That's a good question; I'm in the 'external' camp. But other browsers such as Edge and Chrome have built-in support, so there's a percentage of Mozilla management and user base that would regard a browser as feature incomplete if it didn't have it. At least, once the scaffolding is done, they can hand off development to the Chrome team and thence focus on the core browser issues of implementing HTML 5.x
acemarke 10y ago
As an outside observer and Firefox user, this seems ridiculous and I don't understand the thought process at all. PDF.js works as far as I've seen, and my understanding was it was pure web technologies. How does Flash fit into this? Why is dropping PDF.js suddenly a priority?
- azakai 10y ago
  PDF.js worked in my experience too, but it's the usual problem with a massively complex format like PDFs - getting 80% or 90% is feasible, and PDF.js does that great, but getting to 100% - things like forms, etc. - is very, very hard. It's easier to just use an existing PDF renderer like PDFium that already has the 100%. The Flash thing is separate. Flash is sadly still necessary on the web - most people won't use a browser without Flash, except on mobile. And the pepper version of Flash is more stable than the other. Where the two connect is that if you support enough pepper for pepper-Flash, then you also have the option to use that pepper support to run PDFium.
  - izacus 10y ago
    Plus, pdfium is actively updated, patched and maintained by Google.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Translation - Firefox wants to "leverage" some Chromium source code to reduce their workload.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  If that means that they get to focus more effort on improving Firefox's now aging renderer, and continue to improve their JS engine, I'm all for it.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    I wonder how long it is before they adopt Blink. So they can focus on more important things, of course.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Hopefully, never. Because if they do that, then there won't be more important thing to focus on.
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      I doubt that they would, because that would make a less diverse web, and take us back to about 2004 or so.
      - wott 10y ago
        Which would be a very good thing, for we might witness the raise of a fresh new Mozilla and a new Firefox kicking ass, instead of watching year after year the decay of the current ones.
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        ...Do you really think that would happen? You give the world too much credit. If firefox jumped to blink, we'd just shrug our shoulders. A few of the hardcore would move to IceWeasel or PaleMoon, but the majority of people, even developers, might shake their heads a bit, but wouldn't really care all that much.
BuckRogers 10y ago
But they managed to run out Brendan Eich, good work eh? Really on a roll. I've been using FF since it was in beta as Phoenix and never stopped using it. I would have to agree with you. I don't share all of Eich's politics in general but I also don't care about Eich's politics (I'm an adult). Mozilla chose politics over tech. I think the only path to redemption for Mozilla is to bring back Eich with a full apology and give him total control. Let him clean out some of these clowns. That won't happen, they're probably done.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  The Eich affair was really stupid, but what evidence is there he'd do any better?
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  OTOH, you have no proof that Eich didn't just resign. Getting hate mail day and night isn't easy for anybody. God knows he wouldn't be he first to crack under the pressure.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 and marked it off-topic.
kinkdr 10y ago
If Mozilla wants to lower their engineering costs, wouldn't it make sense to start cutting back on projects like Rust? Don't get me wrong, Rust is an amazing project and I am happy it exists and grateful for their work on it, but if I had to choose between Rust and Firefox, for the shake of internet and freedom I would choose Firefox. I guess a PDF viewer or just another implementation of Flash is not sexy, interesting work, but IMHO is more aligned with the mission of Mozilla.
- the8472 10y ago
  Presumably the long-term goal of rust is to reduce firefox engineering effort by allowing firefox internals to be written in rust.
  - eliben 10y ago
    I wonder how many "second-systems" in the history of SW development were devised to "reduce engineering costs in the long-term", and then went on to sink hundreds of SWE-years, including new programming languages and tools.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  Investing in Rust is the best Mozilla can do for the long-term prospects of Firefox. The safety and speed of a modern language like Rust could be a real game changer when it comes to the competition with Chrome.
  - kinkdr 10y ago
    OK, I chose Rust just as an example. We can pick another one, something more obvious like Firefox OS.
    - creshal 10y ago
      It was already shut down. Years after they should have – actually it should never have been started in the first place –, but they finally did pull the plug.
serge2k 10y ago
Hey, they may be fucking up their browser constantly and doing things the user base hates, but at least the CEO didn't give money to prop 8.
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 and marked it off-topic.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    The ousting of Brandon Eich is on topic for Mozillas current direction.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      I'm a person who feels Eich was bullied, but it's not directly related to this discussion.
nachtigall 10y ago
How many people are working on PDF.js that are paid by Mozilla? https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/graphs/contributors https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/graphs/contributors looks like there are only 2 main contributors (i.e. maintainers, in the sense of continuously and ongoing committing for longer time)
- brendandahl 10y ago
  Yury and I are the only paid staff that work very occasionally on PDF.js. We both have not been full time on the project for quite awhile. We do have a pretty active community and quite a few outside companies using PDF.js though.
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    Thanks. Your answer and your work even more so are very much appreciated! I hope you can keep it up. Maybe some of the other companies could also jump in with as financier (though I do not have too high hopes for this as taking is more common than giving...)
    - derefr 10y ago
      Seems like the Internet Archive would be the most likely org to care: a Javascript renderer for PDFs lines up with their "preservation and easy display through in-browser emulation" philosophy.
  - phonon 10y ago
    Please finish first class form capabilities...there is a whole world of enterprise/governmental usage it can influence in a positive way.
    - cpeterso 10y ago
      PDF form support is one of the primary motivations for adopting PDFium in place of PDF.js.
hannob 10y ago
This sounds very strange to me. Many people are pretty excited that Mozilla is doing this Rust thing and trying to move the rendering engine to a safer language. And now they start a project that: a) wants to keep flash alive longer. b) wants to replace their javascript (aka already memsafe) PDF renderer with a C++ one. I mean I get that pdf.js is not perfect. It had some bad security vulns in the past. But pdfium also has a pretty bad wrap when it comes to vulns (I got plenty of bounties for it myself). But more than that: It's moving from a memsafe language back to C++. That doesn't seem to make any sense at all. If anything they should move their PDF renderer to Rust. And Flash... please just let it die in peace and don't put any more effort into supporting it.
- makomk 10y ago
  Hell, even I managed to get a vuln bounty out of PDFium despite never actually looking for vulnerabilities in it.
- geofft 10y ago
  The Pepper API is supposed to be super easily sandboxable, though, right? It would be extremely strange if they decided to run PDFium and Pepper Flash unsandboxed, since I expect that the upstream projects treat them in the security model where Chrome sandboxes them. But if they are sandboxing it (and hopefully writing the sandbox in a memory-safe language), does it matter much? Or am I just completely confused?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmix 10y ago
    Firefox sandboxes plugins like Flash and DRM plugins [1]. They weren't sandboxing web content previously (which I assume means PDF.js wasn't sandboxed?). But they announced this year [2] that they will be copying Chrome's security model and again supporting per-tab sandboxing. Instead of running all web content in one big process. Not sure if this was rolled out yet. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1111998 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1111998 [2] http://www.myce.com/news/firefox-finally-gets-sandboxing-improve-security-stability-performance-79102/ http://www.myce.com/news/firefox-finally-gets-sandboxing-imp...
j-pb 10y ago
I can't wait for the day Firefox usage drops below the threshold where we can stop supporting it. It's becoming the new IE in terms of quality and whining when it comes to implementing features other browsers delivered ages ago. This is just another nail in its quality koffin.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
amluto 10y ago
Erk. In my experience, even ignoring issues of JavaScript vs unsafe languages, PDF.js provides a much better experience. I'd like to see Google switch to PDF.js, not vice versa.
garaetjjte 10y ago
Why they want to drop NPAPI?
- ozten 10y ago
  My guess would be that a large portion of FF crashes are from NPAPI plugins. PDF.js and Shumway were early attempts to provide alternatives that could eliminate needing these popular plugins.
- petecox 10y ago
  Because it's too much effort to port to Servo and they'd rather piggyback on Chrome's plugin efforts?
  - dblohm7 10y ago
    No, it is because NPAPI is a stability and performance nightmare. No sane person in 2016 would want to port it to Servo or anything else.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I wish more of the world considered PDF and Flash to be obsolete/deprecated technologies. The amount of energy wasted on these rotten old techs is such a shame. That said, if someone has to do it, I felt better about PDF.js than I feel about the Chrome implementation, for a few reasons. Higher level language means less surface area for vulnerabilities (though I guess it's never been perfect, either). Being a huge and complex project in JavaScript means it works the JS engine and renderer in the browser pretty hard and can provide a great test suite for the browser itself. Being JavaScript also means improvements in the VM (whether performance or security) automatically improve the PDF renderer (though I guess PDFium is quite a bit faster already, so that's less of a benefit on the PDF.js side). Honestly, though, these are dead technologies, to me. I use them only when absolutely necessary. I don't have Flash installed on any of my machines and have no intention to do so. I do have to look at PDFs now and then, but I don't like it. I'm tired of people slapping the paper skeuomorph onto web pages. Web pages are better than paper, in every dimension, so stop imitating paper! Having to load up a buggy, quirky, weird-looking, plugin to view the damned thing is just adding insult to injury. So...let'em die. But, I guess if Mozilla feels like they need to keep providing it for now, I'm fine with them doing whatever they have to do to make it cost as little as possible. Mozilla has wasted enough money over the years on weird projects; I guess supporting Flash and PDF count as another one. (Even though I like PDF.js a lot, for making PDF less of an asshole.)
- MildlySerious 10y ago
  Honest question, if PDF is obsolete, what technology/format was it made obsolete by that is not dependent on the cloud like Google Docs? What lightweight format is there that I can export my .doc's to that I can send to my clients?
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    We're speaking completely different languages here, I'm afraid. I don't "send .docs to my clients". I haven't opened Word in a decade or more. I occasionally share a Google Doc with people I'm working with, but only for the collaboration features, not because I want them to see what a nice font I selected for the headers. I recently removed PDF export of invoices from my company shopping cart, and converted it to use an HTML document instead; I spent a couple of days of my labor removing PDF functionality. Same style sheet, looks the same when printed, provides the same information, but no external tools needed. PDF is an anti-pattern, and if I'm working with someone and they send me a PDF I instantly like them less (except in the very rare circumstance that it's necessary to print the thing, like signing documents, though even that can be mostly automated away with tech). So, I'll answer your question with my own: What are you sending your clients in PDF? Why? Why isn't it online yet? Why are you manually creating these docs, whatever they are, and emailing them to someone? I switched payment providers because my last one mailed me a PDF form, and asked me to sign and send it back. I said "no thanks", and signed up with someone who lives in this century. There's very little that people do with PDF that can't be done better some other way.
simonw 10y ago
Google Groups is such a lousy product these days. It uses stupid shebang-URLs, it requires you to sign in to view anything... but in signing in it forgets which URL you were trying to visit and dumps you back on the homepage. It's a pretty good case study in why rebuilding your product entirely in JavaScript isn't necessarily a good idea.
- nol13 10y ago
  Cached version of this anywhere for those who would rather not sign in to google?
Waterluvian 10y ago
Maybe I'm living under a rock and am asking the obvious: is Mozilla just massively downsizing their expenditures because they're suffering badly?
piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
First good move of Mozilla since many years. PDF.js is a nightmare.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Who made this decision? Does anyone outside Mozilla think this is a great decision? I'm asking in good faith - just not sure how they came to this direction, and unable to see how it's in their best interest.
revelation 10y ago
Man, is there a browser vendor out there that can withstand the market pressure and doesn't have the fuck you money to constantly reinvent the same thing over and over again, badly? Every in browser PDF renderer seems to start with the same "we don't like plugins" mindset, they implement the basic stuff in a frenzy.. and then leave it broken without support for important, real world features. Chrome doesn't do annotations, need not talk about PDF.js.. PDF used to be a pretty reliable compatibility format, if read only, and browsers are single-handedly trying to ruin it. It's like they are jealous.
vamur 10y ago
Strange decision. If the goal is to save resources, then the effective solution would be to remove support for NPAPI plugins and move PDF.js to an addon. Especially as there are plenty of excellent PDF viewers on all platforms and Flash is dead for most people. Otherwise, Mozilla will still be spending resources integrating pdfium and Pepper Flash codebase and debugging bugs related to their usage.
mrottenkolber 10y ago
When I click a non HTML link, FF asks me what to do, I select open and it opens the PDF with mupdf. I get that on windows you don’t want require people to download Acrobat reader, but why not just bundle FF with a good PDF reader on Windows? There must be open source projects doing PDF on Windows? The last ESR of Firefox was reasonably fast, since I updated to 45 everything is sluggish. The upside is that some HTML5 audio features work better now, the downside is that the Youtube video player is so inefficient I needed to install a plugin that disables it (the fan is roaring). Many years ago I installed a native Mplayer plugin for Firefox, and I could watch videos on the web. It was a 800Mhz CPU, and a 32MB Radeon graphics card? I could play videos without touching the CPU? Right now I am typing a HN comment and FF sits at 100% for whatever reason... My point is, everything implemented in a browser that is not a HTML/CSS renderer or JS JIT compiler, seems to suck to the point of being useless. As much as I would like to get rid of the Flashplayer plugin, its the most reasonable way to play video in FF. Less of a CPU hog, less crashes. How did we get into this mess?
- FuriouslyAdrift 10y ago
  We use SumatraPDF at work for Windows machines and it works great.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  > why not just bundle FF with a good PDF reader on Windows? There must be open source projects doing PDF on Windows? That's the plan: PDFium is an open-source PDF reader.
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    Same argument why Opera chose to base their browser on Blink. PDFium is 100% dependent on Google. I do not think it's a clever move to go down into this dependency. Sure web > pdf > flash in terms of mozilla's focus, but I fear pdf will be part of the web for a long time to come.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
I understand they want to remove duplication. On the other hand they've got over a billion (!) of dollar over the years, created dozens of projects that had nothing to do with the browser, develop their own language and now want to cut costs on Firefox.
wsha 10y ago
Hmmm, after Australis changed the UI, e10s has begun to enlarge the memory footprint, XUL was ditched for Chrome extensions, and support for encrypted media extensions was added, I didn't think Firefox had much left that it could do to become more like Chrome, but I guess Mozilla is going to keep surprising us.

186 points by lmedinas 10y ago

I think this is bad news. I really like that pdf's in firefox is just another webpage. This means that all my plugins and other HTML-shenanigans can be used on pdf's. This also appears to be a step away from Mozillas strategy of web-technologies everywhere.

jamesgeck0 10y ago
While I also appreciate Mozilla's browser renderer, PDFs really aren't web technology. If it's a question of constrained resources, I'd prefer Mozilla focus their energy on improving HTML-shenanigans overall, not maintaining a PDF rendering application.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I fail to see how they are so constrained. They have more money than ever, and have just dropped Firefox OS, which - all things equal - should free up a lot of developers.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    For how long? Sure they have a deal with Yahoo (Verizon?) that could fund them for some time. When that deal runs its course what do they have to bargain with? Their market share is currently in the single digits on the desktop and they have virtually no market share on mobile which increasingly is more relevant than the desktop in terms of usage. It's smart for them to decrease costs and maintenance burden right now while they still have the resources.
    - makomk 10y ago
      I'd like to use them on mobile, mainly because ads are so absolutely obnoxious on there, but their user interface isn't that great and seems to be the one place they haven't copied Chrome.
    - wodenokoto 10y ago
      Desktop usage is still around 15% according to statcounter. They are ~7% across devices. Firefox for Android has become really good, and I prefer it to Chrome, but my impression is that mobile users are very unlikely to stray from their default browser, even if it is just the blue globe "internet"
      - floatboth 10y ago
        well, until those users want to block ads...
  - the8472 10y ago
    other things they have put thunderbird and parts of the addon system in maintenance mode. Various other less frequently used browser features have been discontinued too. So there has been some fat-cutting going on for a while now.
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    Care to hazard a guess at the number of people at Google working on Chrome or at Microsoft working on Edge? Last I checked both were bigger than the number Mozilla has working on Firefox. And yes, the people who were working on Firefox OS are now working on other things, and we _still_ don't have enough people to cover all the things that need doing...
  - petecox 10y ago
    pdf.js and B2G cancellation were probably linked in that one justification for a pure JS renderer was to display PDFs on Firefox OS.
- syshum 10y ago
  They might as well adopt blink. Make Firefox a Chromium Clone/Fork and call it a day, that seems to be what they want.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    > that seems to be what they want It doesn't seem that way, considering all of the effort they've put into Servo.
    - Amezarak 10y ago
      They've also put a lot of effort into looking and acting more like Chrome. I killed auto update on Firefox when they added search suggestions more like chrome because it broke my workflow. People had complained about the ui being made more like chrome, features being dropped to be more like chrome, etc., for a while. Then you have the deprecation of the Firefox extension model in favor of, essentially, chrome's. It is harder and harder to see how Firefox stands out on its own as opposed to being a chrome imitator. This is just the latest example. If they think they can sell Firefox based on a free and open web instead of based on power user features, a great extension ecosystem, or whatever, I can only say...good luck. I don't know many projects that have succeeded outside a small core of users based on ideology. Servo may be the distant future of Firefox. But I am becoming increasingly pessimistic that Firefox will even make it to that future, which I feel awful about. I don't understand what mozillas leadership is doing.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        > I don't understand what mozillas leadership is doing. Desperately trying to get back to two-digit marketshare? Trying to compete, as the last major open browser, against all the corporate browsers?
        alphapapa 10y ago
        Trying, yes. But the method they have chosen is to abandon what made Firefox popular in the first place and imitate Chrome. So why not just use Chrome? IOW, they're killing the goose that laid the golden egg by trying to transform it into a duck. But if I wanted a duck, I'd already have a duck. I guess they're blaming Chrome for their lost market share rather than blaming themselves for mismanaging their product. So instead of fixing their mismanagement, they're just trying to copy Chrome. They used to be leaders (without Mozilla, Chrome probably wouldn't exist as it does today), but now the leader has become the follower. And who needs another follower? Another perspective is that the Web has "grown up" since 1998. Back then the percentage of Web users who were "power users" (remember, empowering users was the mission back then; "Take back the web!") was much higher--but the raw number was still enough to be fruitful. Since then, half the planet is on the Internet, and the percentage of them that are power users is much lower. The raw number is surely much higher still, but that's not enough for Mozilla--they've got to appeal to the masses to get the percentages. All the loyal users who've been with Mozilla for nearly two decades? They can switch to...uh...Pale Moon, I guess. Mozilla just wants the noobs, because that supposedly brings in the most money. I hate to say it, but Mozilla needs to die so it can be reborn--again. Every so often, the tree of browser needs to be cleansed with the blood of layoffs--something like that. Then their successors can focus on making a good browser instead of chasing more millions.
scrollaway 10y ago
Oh jesus christ. The entire ML thread is bad news. Why on earth would they move away from PDF.js (which is a fantastic project) and then use that move to justify Mortar? Also, I just learned this from the thread: Why the fuck would they kill Shumway? I'm all for killing Flash, but Shumway is an important tool not just for migration, it's also really important for archival. God damn it Mozilla. I've talked about this before, too: Hearing Mozilla executives, each Mozfest, talk about commitment to the free web. Commitment to open technologies. What commitment, exactly? In a handful of years, Mozilla has managed to severely damage its poster child web browser's reputation by including then subsequently dropping drm, by including then subsequently dropping Hello (a good initiative with a horrible user experience), by completely screwing up the launch of Pocket (which they could only have done by massively misunderstanding their userbase). In that same handful of years, Mozilla took some good initiatives, such as Persona and Firefox OS, completely botched marketing and experience on both, severely underestimated the required efforts on the latter, then dropped both projects. In that same handful of years, Mozilla dropped support for its second poster child, Thunderbird, arguably the last decent FOSS email client. It all screams mismanagement and I haven't even talked about half of the problems. I've been upset about all this for some time but now writing it all out I'm starting to wonder of Mozilla isn't just in a free fall. PS: I 100% understand the concerns and difficulties of allocating development time but this is a pattern I keep seeing with Mozilla: Spin up a project, get it to 80%, give up. You could build a castle with the amount of efforts wasted on projects either doomed from the beginning (FxOs), or dropped near the finish line. This is all absurd.
- fdej 10y ago
  Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallback, but considering how important PDF files are, looking for a better solution makes sense.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Agreed. As an OS X user, I hate it any time a browser or website uses something like PDF.js instead of the native PDF support. The native PDF support in OS X is fast and excellent.
serge2k 10y ago
I don't particularly like the idea of mozilla bringing in this from chrome just to cut costs. Just feels like a step towards chrome further dominating.
- petecox 10y ago
  They're deprecating XUL and the NPAPI plugin architecture so that they can move to servo relatively legacy free. Importing Chrome's SWF and PDF is a way to stress test their new plugin implementation. Not maintaining pdf.js seems a budgeting decision but Flash is restoring functionality to Linux via a cross-browser plugin, which Adobe had abandoned for Chrome only.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
OTOH, this means more focus on things like Rust, Servo, Gecko improvements, and JS engine optimizations (to say nothing of implementing ES6 and beyond).

jasonkostempski 10y ago

Why not just drop Flash and PDF support? Flash is dead and PDFs never needed to be rendered in browsers in the first place, they can already be opened through free, cross-platform, open source programs with all the features on the goal list.

jamesgeck0 10y ago
A few popular sites in the US still require Flash, Hulu is one of them. If Mozilla drops in-browser PDF support, I think it would make them the only major browser with no support?
- lbenes 10y ago
  CBS.com requires flash and has lots of great content such as "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert". Also one of my banks requires Flash for online check deposit. If Firefox dropped flash, I'd drop Firefox.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    HBO Go video requires Flash, too.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    I suggest you drop that bank.
tdb7893 10y ago
As a counterpoint I love pdf support in the browser. People post pdf versions of most documents, papers, and presentations and viewing them in the browser makes the overall experience so much better! I actually have chrome as my default pdf viewer because it starts up faster than most other pdf viewers and I'm more used to it.
- derefr 10y ago
  I've never understood why you even needed a browser plugin to do this. Why can't the browser just spawn a PDF viewer-app's COM server or equivalent, and then hand it a rendering context and send UI events back and forth—all without even knowing what exactly the filetype it's embedding is? Which is to say, whatever happened to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding ?

oridecon 10y ago

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project > The core of the Windows sandbox is Google's chromium sandbox. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Windows_2 Any more components that are coming directly from Chromium? This is an interesting move if it allows Mozilla to focus on Servo and the new Rust components. At least I hope that's what they are doing, after the recent Firefox OS news.

the8472 10y ago
The IPC mechanism used for electrolysis was adapted from chrome

LaSombra 10y ago

I would love to see Chrome/Chromium adopting PDF.js, from Mozilla.

lbenes 10y ago
I routinely have to open large spec sheets for work. Have you ever tried to open any large documents with PDF.js? Chrome's pdf plugin can handle 100+ page documents with ease, while Firefox's PDF.js can make the entire browser unresponsive. Hopefully e10s will finally fix this.
nwah1 10y ago
Agreed. PDF.js and multi-process both have room for improvement, but the security benefit is huge. Ideally, NPAPI and Pepper should both die, but I don't necessarily mind them killing NPAPI and adding this minimal set of Pepper support for Flash. Pepper crashes the browser less (though most of the fault lies with Flash). But even if this enables PDFium, it should not be adopted, and the talk of adopting it makes me want to oppose the whole idea of "project mortar."
rcthompson 10y ago
I haven't used Chrome in a while, but I seem to remember being able to use pdf.js in Chrome by installing an extension.
- yohui 10y ago
  Yes, it is available as an extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    I managed to get this working as a WebExtension in Firefox (mostly just hacking around a few APIs that aren't ready in Firefox yet). Could be a path forward for folks that want to keep using pdf.js perhaps.

mmmeff 10y ago

Desktop URL: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.planning/j834iDIG3yY/V84Rzw0cEAAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.planning/j...

cddotdotslash 10y ago

This post has the tone of an organization gasping for relevance: the constant references to cost cutting, focusing on a core component, etc.

creshal 10y ago
If only they could finally decide what this mystical core component is and stick with it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

caiob 10y ago

I know nearly nothing about browser development, but I'm curious to learn as to why Mozilla spends so much time on a PDF renderer?

wodenokoto 10y ago
The PDF.js projects have 2 major scopes: Give Firefox and the broader web a cross-platform, free, opensource PDF-renderer (you can use it to embed PDF in webpages) Give Mozilla real-world experience with bottle-necks in their PDF-renderer.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  Given Mozilla's recent banging on about "core products" and "cost cutting", I'm a bit amazed that a PDF renderer isn't considered out of scope. It seems like another tacked-on feature (with necessarily inclusive bugs, security holes, etc) to the browser that is better handled by external applications that everyone already has.
  - jamesgeck0 10y ago
    It is considered out of scope. That's why they're looking at embedding a 3rd party PDF renderer.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      Which is a fine pithy answer, but does nothing to address the concerns about maintainability, bugs, etc. Any modern system can read PDFs. Why does it need to be in the browser, instead of handed off to the app of the user's choosing?
      - petecox 10y ago
        That's a good question; I'm in the 'external' camp. But other browsers such as Edge and Chrome have built-in support, so there's a percentage of Mozilla management and user base that would regard a browser as feature incomplete if it didn't have it. At least, once the scaffolding is done, they can hand off development to the Chrome team and thence focus on the core browser issues of implementing HTML 5.x

acemarke 10y ago

As an outside observer and Firefox user, this seems ridiculous and I don't understand the thought process at all. PDF.js works as far as I've seen, and my understanding was it was pure web technologies. How does Flash fit into this? Why is dropping PDF.js suddenly a priority?

azakai 10y ago
PDF.js worked in my experience too, but it's the usual problem with a massively complex format like PDFs - getting 80% or 90% is feasible, and PDF.js does that great, but getting to 100% - things like forms, etc. - is very, very hard. It's easier to just use an existing PDF renderer like PDFium that already has the 100%. The Flash thing is separate. Flash is sadly still necessary on the web - most people won't use a browser without Flash, except on mobile. And the pepper version of Flash is more stable than the other. Where the two connect is that if you support enough pepper for pepper-Flash, then you also have the option to use that pepper support to run PDFium.
- izacus 10y ago
  Plus, pdfium is actively updated, patched and maintained by Google.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

Translation - Firefox wants to "leverage" some Chromium source code to reduce their workload.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
If that means that they get to focus more effort on improving Firefox's now aging renderer, and continue to improve their JS engine, I'm all for it.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  I wonder how long it is before they adopt Blink. So they can focus on more important things, of course.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Hopefully, never. Because if they do that, then there won't be more important thing to focus on.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    I doubt that they would, because that would make a less diverse web, and take us back to about 2004 or so.
    - wott 10y ago
      Which would be a very good thing, for we might witness the raise of a fresh new Mozilla and a new Firefox kicking ass, instead of watching year after year the decay of the current ones.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        ...Do you really think that would happen? You give the world too much credit. If firefox jumped to blink, we'd just shrug our shoulders. A few of the hardcore would move to IceWeasel or PaleMoon, but the majority of people, even developers, might shake their heads a bit, but wouldn't really care all that much.

BuckRogers 10y ago

But they managed to run out Brendan Eich, good work eh? Really on a roll. I've been using FF since it was in beta as Phoenix and never stopped using it. I would have to agree with you. I don't share all of Eich's politics in general but I also don't care about Eich's politics (I'm an adult). Mozilla chose politics over tech. I think the only path to redemption for Mozilla is to bring back Eich with a full apology and give him total control. Let him clean out some of these clowns. That won't happen, they're probably done.

scrollaway 10y ago
The Eich affair was really stupid, but what evidence is there he'd do any better?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
OTOH, you have no proof that Eich didn't just resign. Getting hate mail day and night isn't easy for anybody. God knows he wouldn't be he first to crack under the pressure.
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 and marked it off-topic.

kinkdr 10y ago

If Mozilla wants to lower their engineering costs, wouldn't it make sense to start cutting back on projects like Rust? Don't get me wrong, Rust is an amazing project and I am happy it exists and grateful for their work on it, but if I had to choose between Rust and Firefox, for the shake of internet and freedom I would choose Firefox. I guess a PDF viewer or just another implementation of Flash is not sexy, interesting work, but IMHO is more aligned with the mission of Mozilla.

the8472 10y ago
Presumably the long-term goal of rust is to reduce firefox engineering effort by allowing firefox internals to be written in rust.
- eliben 10y ago
  I wonder how many "second-systems" in the history of SW development were devised to "reduce engineering costs in the long-term", and then went on to sink hundreds of SWE-years, including new programming languages and tools.
nachtigall 10y ago
Investing in Rust is the best Mozilla can do for the long-term prospects of Firefox. The safety and speed of a modern language like Rust could be a real game changer when it comes to the competition with Chrome.
- kinkdr 10y ago
  OK, I chose Rust just as an example. We can pick another one, something more obvious like Firefox OS.
  - creshal 10y ago
    It was already shut down. Years after they should have – actually it should never have been started in the first place –, but they finally did pull the plug.

serge2k 10y ago

Hey, they may be fucking up their browser constantly and doing things the user base hates, but at least the CEO didn't give money to prop 8.

sctb 10y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614692 and marked it off-topic.
- serge2k 10y ago
  The ousting of Brandon Eich is on topic for Mozillas current direction.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    I'm a person who feels Eich was bullied, but it's not directly related to this discussion.

nachtigall 10y ago

How many people are working on PDF.js that are paid by Mozilla? https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/graphs/contributors https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/graphs/contributors looks like there are only 2 main contributors (i.e. maintainers, in the sense of continuously and ongoing committing for longer time)

brendandahl 10y ago
Yury and I are the only paid staff that work very occasionally on PDF.js. We both have not been full time on the project for quite awhile. We do have a pretty active community and quite a few outside companies using PDF.js though.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  Thanks. Your answer and your work even more so are very much appreciated! I hope you can keep it up. Maybe some of the other companies could also jump in with as financier (though I do not have too high hopes for this as taking is more common than giving...)
  - derefr 10y ago
    Seems like the Internet Archive would be the most likely org to care: a Javascript renderer for PDFs lines up with their "preservation and easy display through in-browser emulation" philosophy.
- phonon 10y ago
  Please finish first class form capabilities...there is a whole world of enterprise/governmental usage it can influence in a positive way.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    PDF form support is one of the primary motivations for adopting PDFium in place of PDF.js.

hannob 10y ago

This sounds very strange to me. Many people are pretty excited that Mozilla is doing this Rust thing and trying to move the rendering engine to a safer language. And now they start a project that: a) wants to keep flash alive longer. b) wants to replace their javascript (aka already memsafe) PDF renderer with a C++ one. I mean I get that pdf.js is not perfect. It had some bad security vulns in the past. But pdfium also has a pretty bad wrap when it comes to vulns (I got plenty of bounties for it myself). But more than that: It's moving from a memsafe language back to C++. That doesn't seem to make any sense at all. If anything they should move their PDF renderer to Rust. And Flash... please just let it die in peace and don't put any more effort into supporting it.

makomk 10y ago
Hell, even I managed to get a vuln bounty out of PDFium despite never actually looking for vulnerabilities in it.
geofft 10y ago
The Pepper API is supposed to be super easily sandboxable, though, right? It would be extremely strange if they decided to run PDFium and Pepper Flash unsandboxed, since I expect that the upstream projects treat them in the security model where Chrome sandboxes them. But if they are sandboxing it (and hopefully writing the sandbox in a memory-safe language), does it matter much? Or am I just completely confused?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dmix 10y ago
  Firefox sandboxes plugins like Flash and DRM plugins [1]. They weren't sandboxing web content previously (which I assume means PDF.js wasn't sandboxed?). But they announced this year [2] that they will be copying Chrome's security model and again supporting per-tab sandboxing. Instead of running all web content in one big process. Not sure if this was rolled out yet. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1111998 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1111998 [2] http://www.myce.com/news/firefox-finally-gets-sandboxing-improve-security-stability-performance-79102/ http://www.myce.com/news/firefox-finally-gets-sandboxing-imp...

j-pb 10y ago

I can't wait for the day Firefox usage drops below the threshold where we can stop supporting it. It's becoming the new IE in terms of quality and whining when it comes to implementing features other browsers delivered ages ago. This is just another nail in its quality koffin.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

amluto 10y ago

Erk. In my experience, even ignoring issues of JavaScript vs unsafe languages, PDF.js provides a much better experience. I'd like to see Google switch to PDF.js, not vice versa.

garaetjjte 10y ago

Why they want to drop NPAPI?

ozten 10y ago
My guess would be that a large portion of FF crashes are from NPAPI plugins. PDF.js and Shumway were early attempts to provide alternatives that could eliminate needing these popular plugins.
petecox 10y ago
Because it's too much effort to port to Servo and they'd rather piggyback on Chrome's plugin efforts?
- dblohm7 10y ago
  No, it is because NPAPI is a stability and performance nightmare. No sane person in 2016 would want to port it to Servo or anything else.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I wish more of the world considered PDF and Flash to be obsolete/deprecated technologies. The amount of energy wasted on these rotten old techs is such a shame. That said, if someone has to do it, I felt better about PDF.js than I feel about the Chrome implementation, for a few reasons. Higher level language means less surface area for vulnerabilities (though I guess it's never been perfect, either). Being a huge and complex project in JavaScript means it works the JS engine and renderer in the browser pretty hard and can provide a great test suite for the browser itself. Being JavaScript also means improvements in the VM (whether performance or security) automatically improve the PDF renderer (though I guess PDFium is quite a bit faster already, so that's less of a benefit on the PDF.js side). Honestly, though, these are dead technologies, to me. I use them only when absolutely necessary. I don't have Flash installed on any of my machines and have no intention to do so. I do have to look at PDFs now and then, but I don't like it. I'm tired of people slapping the paper skeuomorph onto web pages. Web pages are better than paper, in every dimension, so stop imitating paper! Having to load up a buggy, quirky, weird-looking, plugin to view the damned thing is just adding insult to injury. So...let'em die. But, I guess if Mozilla feels like they need to keep providing it for now, I'm fine with them doing whatever they have to do to make it cost as little as possible. Mozilla has wasted enough money over the years on weird projects; I guess supporting Flash and PDF count as another one. (Even though I like PDF.js a lot, for making PDF less of an asshole.)

MildlySerious 10y ago
Honest question, if PDF is obsolete, what technology/format was it made obsolete by that is not dependent on the cloud like Google Docs? What lightweight format is there that I can export my .doc's to that I can send to my clients?
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  We're speaking completely different languages here, I'm afraid. I don't "send .docs to my clients". I haven't opened Word in a decade or more. I occasionally share a Google Doc with people I'm working with, but only for the collaboration features, not because I want them to see what a nice font I selected for the headers. I recently removed PDF export of invoices from my company shopping cart, and converted it to use an HTML document instead; I spent a couple of days of my labor removing PDF functionality. Same style sheet, looks the same when printed, provides the same information, but no external tools needed. PDF is an anti-pattern, and if I'm working with someone and they send me a PDF I instantly like them less (except in the very rare circumstance that it's necessary to print the thing, like signing documents, though even that can be mostly automated away with tech). So, I'll answer your question with my own: What are you sending your clients in PDF? Why? Why isn't it online yet? Why are you manually creating these docs, whatever they are, and emailing them to someone? I switched payment providers because my last one mailed me a PDF form, and asked me to sign and send it back. I said "no thanks", and signed up with someone who lives in this century. There's very little that people do with PDF that can't be done better some other way.

simonw 10y ago

Google Groups is such a lousy product these days. It uses stupid shebang-URLs, it requires you to sign in to view anything... but in signing in it forgets which URL you were trying to visit and dumps you back on the homepage. It's a pretty good case study in why rebuilding your product entirely in JavaScript isn't necessarily a good idea.

nol13 10y ago
Cached version of this anywhere for those who would rather not sign in to google?

Waterluvian 10y ago

Maybe I'm living under a rock and am asking the obvious: is Mozilla just massively downsizing their expenditures because they're suffering badly?

piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago

First good move of Mozilla since many years. PDF.js is a nightmare.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Who made this decision? Does anyone outside Mozilla think this is a great decision? I'm asking in good faith - just not sure how they came to this direction, and unable to see how it's in their best interest.

revelation 10y ago

Man, is there a browser vendor out there that can withstand the market pressure and doesn't have the fuck you money to constantly reinvent the same thing over and over again, badly? Every in browser PDF renderer seems to start with the same "we don't like plugins" mindset, they implement the basic stuff in a frenzy.. and then leave it broken without support for important, real world features. Chrome doesn't do annotations, need not talk about PDF.js.. PDF used to be a pretty reliable compatibility format, if read only, and browsers are single-handedly trying to ruin it. It's like they are jealous.

vamur 10y ago

Strange decision. If the goal is to save resources, then the effective solution would be to remove support for NPAPI plugins and move PDF.js to an addon. Especially as there are plenty of excellent PDF viewers on all platforms and Flash is dead for most people. Otherwise, Mozilla will still be spending resources integrating pdfium and Pepper Flash codebase and debugging bugs related to their usage.

mrottenkolber 10y ago

When I click a non HTML link, FF asks me what to do, I select open and it opens the PDF with mupdf. I get that on windows you don’t want require people to download Acrobat reader, but why not just bundle FF with a good PDF reader on Windows? There must be open source projects doing PDF on Windows? The last ESR of Firefox was reasonably fast, since I updated to 45 everything is sluggish. The upside is that some HTML5 audio features work better now, the downside is that the Youtube video player is so inefficient I needed to install a plugin that disables it (the fan is roaring). Many years ago I installed a native Mplayer plugin for Firefox, and I could watch videos on the web. It was a 800Mhz CPU, and a 32MB Radeon graphics card? I could play videos without touching the CPU? Right now I am typing a HN comment and FF sits at 100% for whatever reason... My point is, everything implemented in a browser that is not a HTML/CSS renderer or JS JIT compiler, seems to suck to the point of being useless. As much as I would like to get rid of the Flashplayer plugin, its the most reasonable way to play video in FF. Less of a CPU hog, less crashes. How did we get into this mess?

FuriouslyAdrift 10y ago
We use SumatraPDF at work for Windows machines and it works great.
cpeterso 10y ago
> why not just bundle FF with a good PDF reader on Windows? There must be open source projects doing PDF on Windows? That's the plan: PDFium is an open-source PDF reader.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  Same argument why Opera chose to base their browser on Blink. PDFium is 100% dependent on Google. I do not think it's a clever move to go down into this dependency. Sure web > pdf > flash in terms of mozilla's focus, but I fear pdf will be part of the web for a long time to come.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

I understand they want to remove duplication. On the other hand they've got over a billion (!) of dollar over the years, created dozens of projects that had nothing to do with the browser, develop their own language and now want to cut costs on Firefox.

wsha 10y ago

Hmmm, after Australis changed the UI, e10s has begun to enlarge the memory footprint, XUL was ditched for Chrome extensions, and support for encrypted media extensions was added, I didn't think Firefox had much left that it could do to become more like Chrome, but I guess Mozilla is going to keep surprising us.