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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?
by 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 agoThe 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 agoGiven 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 agoIt is considered out of scope. That's why they're looking at embedding a 3rd party PDF renderer.
- Karunamon 10y agoWhich 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 agoThat'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
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- reitanqild 10y agoShort answer: they don't. Slightly longer answer: one of the two main contributors is active in this threads and state that none of the work full time on it.