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I for one find it funny that they claim they wish to reduce the time spent on "a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform"

I for one find it funny that they claim they wish to reduce the time spent on "a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform" reduce complexity and maintenance cost etc, and start with... maintaining their useless PDF viewer. Take it off your code base. Is it a browser or a PDF viewer? I guess expecting sanity from Mozilla really is insane.

AlphaSite 10y ago
Integrated PDF viewers are pretty much a necessary for a little of people.
barnacs 10y ago
I don't get this whole trend of trying to cram everything into browsers. People have been working on PDF viewers, media players, document editors and a whole bunch of applications for decades. Some are more lightweight, some are more feature rich, others are prettier, easier to use or more reliable. Yet there's this weird trend to throw all that away and reimplement everything as part of this huge beast. Why?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Part of the appeal may simply be an UX thing. For instance, I don't think a PDF reader should be a part of the browser codebase, but when I'm reading papers I found on HN, I like it that the PDF opens as another browser tab, not a separate application window.
  - barnacs 10y ago
    I think browsers shouldn't really have tabs in the first place. That's the job of a window manager. And then you can decide which one to use. Do you want tiling or floating windows? Do you want workspaces? Stacked, tabbed, side-by-side layouts? Hotkeys or UI for navigation? Performance or features? And so on.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I'd agree, except I'm yet to see a window manager that would handle splicing browser tabs back into it well.
    - wongarsu 10y ago
      I agree, but browser developers have to work with the reality that most users use Windows, and windows has no reasonable solution to handle tab equivalents, or even large amounts of windows. And windows doesn't have a good way to extend or replace the window manager to fix that. So instead we are stuck with each program implementing their own tabs.
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Mozilla wants to remove the whole plugin API that these tools were depending. And some of the reasons are "Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users."[1] [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plu...
  - barnacs 10y ago
    _Browsers_ are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users. I've had browsers crash, become unresponsive, use unreasonable amounts of memory or cpu. I've had youtube throw errors, load forever or pause videos and refuse to continue playing them. I've had js pdf readers produce unreadable garbage. On the other hand, I've never had any problems with my choice of media player or pdf viewer, even though they offer far more features related to their specific job than any in-browser solution i've seen. And browsers just keep adding more features - more resource hogs, more opportunities to crash and bigger attack surfaces.

AlphaSite 10y ago

Integrated PDF viewers are pretty much a necessary for a little of people.

barnacs 10y ago

I don't get this whole trend of trying to cram everything into browsers. People have been working on PDF viewers, media players, document editors and a whole bunch of applications for decades. Some are more lightweight, some are more feature rich, others are prettier, easier to use or more reliable. Yet there's this weird trend to throw all that away and reimplement everything as part of this huge beast. Why?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Part of the appeal may simply be an UX thing. For instance, I don't think a PDF reader should be a part of the browser codebase, but when I'm reading papers I found on HN, I like it that the PDF opens as another browser tab, not a separate application window.
- barnacs 10y ago
  I think browsers shouldn't really have tabs in the first place. That's the job of a window manager. And then you can decide which one to use. Do you want tiling or floating windows? Do you want workspaces? Stacked, tabbed, side-by-side layouts? Hotkeys or UI for navigation? Performance or features? And so on.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I'd agree, except I'm yet to see a window manager that would handle splicing browser tabs back into it well.
  - wongarsu 10y ago
    I agree, but browser developers have to work with the reality that most users use Windows, and windows has no reasonable solution to handle tab equivalents, or even large amounts of windows. And windows doesn't have a good way to extend or replace the window manager to fix that. So instead we are stuck with each program implementing their own tabs.
jpalomaki 10y ago
Mozilla wants to remove the whole plugin API that these tools were depending. And some of the reasons are "Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users."[1] [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plu...
- barnacs 10y ago
  _Browsers_ are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users. I've had browsers crash, become unresponsive, use unreasonable amounts of memory or cpu. I've had youtube throw errors, load forever or pause videos and refuse to continue playing them. I've had js pdf readers produce unreadable garbage. On the other hand, I've never had any problems with my choice of media player or pdf viewer, even though they offer far more features related to their specific job than any in-browser solution i've seen. And browsers just keep adding more features - more resource hogs, more opportunities to crash and bigger attack surfaces.