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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
by 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 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.
- conradfr 10y agoAgreed. Before PDF.js I was mostly avoiding opening any pdf links because that meant a slow Adobe Reader opening.