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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 f
by 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 agoA 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 agoCBS.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.
- tdb7893 10y agoAs 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 agoI'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 ?
- bla2 10y agoTurns out most programs aren't hardened enough to be exposed to random files from the internet.
- mindslight 10y agoHow many PDFs don't qualify as "random files from the Internet" ?
- krylon 10y agoThe ones you create yourself, I guess. ;-)
- tmzt 10y agoI think you just described ActiveX.
- chris_wot 10y agoNo, it can't be done easily. ActiveX is basically COM+ with some extra interfaces, and it's a total disaster. Mozilla had XPCOM many years ago, and they killed it. So no, it can't be done. Certainly not safely.
- mindslight 10y agoOr better yet, leave window management to window managers. I don't really have a preference one way or another between PDFs opening in evince or PDF.js.
- nodivbyzero 10y agoWhy do I need to install free, cross-platform, open-source program if I can render pdf in my browser?
- jhasse 10y agoYou don't need to install one, it comes pre-installed on Windows, Mac and nearly all Linux distros. (The first two aren't open-source though).
- oblio 10y agoMaybe I missed some recent news, but what PDF viewer is pre-installed on Windows?
- mhurron 10y agoThere was one in Windows 8 (Windows Reader) but it was removed in Windows 10. It is still available for free in the Windows Store.
- jhasse 10y agoYeah I was thinking of the one included in Windows 8, didn't know that they dropped it.
- rincebrain 10y agoDid they? Edge definitely still opens PDFs by default on Windows 10.
- mhurron 10y agoDid you upgrade from Windows 8 or install new? New installs of Windows 10 or upgrades from 7 won't have it installed. I'm talking about Reader btw, which would be analogous to macOS's Preview. Edge is like Firefox with PDF.js. Reader works better than PDF.js too.
- 10y ago
- mccr8 10y agoFlash is not entirely dead yet, so support can't be completely dropped. However, both Chrome [1] and Firefox [2] have announced long-term schedules for removing support for Flash, bit by bit. As for PDF, the PDF viewers shipped in browsers seem to be much more hardened against attack than the stand alone ones people use, so as a practical matter, including a PDF viewer helps keep users safe. [1] https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-adobe-flash-usage-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-...
- lima 10y agoI love PDFs in the browser. It means that they're nicely sandboxed and secure.
- vdnkh 10y ago>why not just drop Flash The reason Flash is still around is because of ads. Most (video) ads are served through Flash still and publishers still don't know how to switch, or don't want to. Source: I work for a video player company
- catdog 10y agoThats only a reason to drop it earlier. I don't think users care if ads are not working.
- chris_wot 10y agoAgreed. Advertisers are stupid these days. They don't realise that when they crap in their own backyard, nobody goes near them. If they want to misuse Flash (which they do, all the time) then we all stop using Flash. Most of us install ad blockers.
- chris_wot 10y agoFolks might want to downvote me, but Flash ads are a big reason why people install adblockers. It's now shifting to JavaScript injections from ad networks, so it's only a matter of time before adblockers start analysing JavaScript to prevent them from misusing this mechanism also.
- amyjess 10y agoWhen NSAPI plugins were around, I could use kpartsplugin to make PDFs render with KDE's PDF reader in the browser window. This was the perfect solution, and I'm still more than a little bit pissed that it's no longer available.