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>It's not great It's simpler than a pdf viewer. >It's a cost-benefit analysis If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone a

>It's not great It's simpler than a pdf viewer. >It's a cost-benefit analysis If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone already had one. Near-zero benefit, huge cost. >I want Mozilla to do more. At this point I'm afraid we're just going to have to agree to disagree. For the last 5+ years, Every time Mozilla "do more", I throw up in my mouth a little.

oblio 5y ago
> If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone already had one. Near-zero benefit, huge cost. Every time I clicked a PDF online, I dreaded the external viewer opening (especially Adobe Reader). I very much liked when they integrated a PDF viewer. Chrome also has one. I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the users the FTP client had.
- antisol 5y ago
  Sounds like you had a shitty pdf viewer installed. Which is not my problem. Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? >I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the users the FTP client had. Yeah, that tends to happen when you change the defaults without asking.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Vent, rant, get it out of your system :-)
    - antisol 5y ago
      Way ahead of ya ;) but you didn't address my question
      - oblio 5y ago
        All PDF viewers are crap in my experience. If you don't agree, you haven't used PDF enough. PDF has Javascript as a programming language, it has extensions for 3D models and a ton of other stuff (I think even sound). As a format it's almost as complex as the entire web stack. Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much. That's not a product decision taken lightly. Your personal experience does not reflect that of many other browser users, it seems. Even on mobile I dread clicking a PDF link.
        antisol 5y ago
        You still haven't addressed my question. I'd respond to the rest of your vague and incorrect opinions, but why would I do that if you're not even going to bother to address my points despite me asking you to repeatedly?
        oblio 5y ago
        > You still haven't addressed my question. If I must spell it out, there you go: > Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? Because you are part of a minority of Chrome and Firefox users and I'm probably part of the majority of users, in this regard. I don't know this for sure, but if a Google program manager decided to back building and embedding an entire PDF reader into a browser, I'm 99% convinced this is true. We're dumb and you have to live with us. Life's tuff.
        antisol 5y ago
        That's.......... actually not a bad answer to my question, goddamnit ;) BUT: you do have to concede that it's not a technical reason. It boils down to "Adobe are goddamn useless, let's just do their job for them because it will make our life a bit easier". There's no requirement for pdf viewing in the HTML spec or anything like that. It's not required for web browsing and it doesn't really have any place in the browser in a technical/engineering sense - from an "engineering purity" perspective these two things should be separate, even if you do like your pdf viewers written in javascript. The "correct/pure" engineering solution would have been for them to bundle their awful javascript pdf viewer in an electron(ish) app and release it as the "google pdf viewer", with all the requisite spam in gmail and the technical press, and to have chrome default to it if it's installed. Hell, you could make it a separate application and still bundle it with chrome. There must have been a LOT of support enquiries about "the adobe doesn't work" for it to survive a cost/benefit analysis for implementing an entire pdf viewer. That's not a trivial piece of work that somebody churned out in an afternoon (despite the performance of the thing feeling like it ;) ) If I was that product manager, I would not make that decision lightly. First I'd have built a special page into my support area that redirects the user to adobe.com/support if they type "pdf" or "adobe" into the "search support" bar. (You know what I mean - you've seen it in action on help desk sites where they try to fob you off rather than just giving you a "contact us" box straight away). This is all a whole lot easier to implement than a pdf viewer. In fact if you're using something like zendesk you get it for free. For me to decide to build a pdf viewer into my browser, I'd have to be getting a high volume of support emails about it after I'd implemented the change above. I don't think that's what happened. In the post i largely ignored, you said: >Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much Allow me to give you an alternate explanation / interpretation, which I admit might come across as "a little bit cynical" or paranoid, but which I believe to be more fully borne out by the facts than the "cost/benefit analysis" theory you advocate. I don't think "multiple browsers" did that at all. Here's my theory: 1. Google decided to build a pdf viewer into chrome because they were busy trying to turn chrome into an operating system (see also: chrome os), and they knew that would mean including a pdf viewer, since a pdf viewer is a fairly essential tool for an operating system if it wants any kind of mainstream adoption. This had the added side-effect that for many users their pdf viewing experience would improve, because adobe are basically incapable of doing software. So it was really a "two-fer" for google. 2. Mozilla, seeing google's announcement for a pdf viewer built into their browser, did what Mozilla has been doing for the past decade: copy Chrome without giving any thought at all to any of the considerations you and I are discussing today. Or indeed any consideration other than "what is google doing with chrome this week?". Now, I do try to keep my paranoia and cynicism in check, but to me this seems like a far more likely explanation. Perhaps I'm wrong. It would be kind of nice if I was. If you have some data to support your theory I'd love to see it. I don't have much data to back up my theory. I can't be bothered looking into what chrome's support site was like pre-pdf-support. But I do have one data point: I can confirm that chrome added pdf support first, with Mozilla aping them almost immediately (they were pretty much at parity within a year or two). Maybe Mozilla had coincidentally already done a full cost/benefit analysis of adding a pdf viewer before google went live with theirs. It's not impossible. But it seems a little unlikely to me. </rant> ;)

oblio 5y ago

> If it were, they'd have never added a pdf viewer in the first place. Everyone already had one. Near-zero benefit, huge cost. Every time I clicked a PDF online, I dreaded the external viewer opening (especially Adobe Reader). I very much liked when they integrated a PDF viewer. Chrome also has one. I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the users the FTP client had.

antisol 5y ago
Sounds like you had a shitty pdf viewer installed. Which is not my problem. Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? >I'm willing to bet the internal PDF viewer has at least 100x (more likely 1000x) the users the FTP client had. Yeah, that tends to happen when you change the defaults without asking.
- oblio 5y ago
  Vent, rant, get it out of your system :-)
  - antisol 5y ago
    Way ahead of ya ;) but you didn't address my question
    - oblio 5y ago
      All PDF viewers are crap in my experience. If you don't agree, you haven't used PDF enough. PDF has Javascript as a programming language, it has extensions for 3D models and a ton of other stuff (I think even sound). As a format it's almost as complex as the entire web stack. Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much. That's not a product decision taken lightly. Your personal experience does not reflect that of many other browser users, it seems. Even on mobile I dread clicking a PDF link.
      - antisol 5y ago
        You still haven't addressed my question. I'd respond to the rest of your vague and incorrect opinions, but why would I do that if you're not even going to bother to address my points despite me asking you to repeatedly?
        oblio 5y ago
        > You still haven't addressed my question. If I must spell it out, there you go: > Why was I forced to install a substandard, feature-poor, ridiculously slow pdf viewer that I never wanted and which took over as the default pdf viewer against my wishes and without asking me, just because you couldn't be bothered to install a decent one? Because you are part of a minority of Chrome and Firefox users and I'm probably part of the majority of users, in this regard. I don't know this for sure, but if a Google program manager decided to back building and embedding an entire PDF reader into a browser, I'm 99% convinced this is true. We're dumb and you have to live with us. Life's tuff.
        antisol 5y ago
        That's.......... actually not a bad answer to my question, goddamnit ;) BUT: you do have to concede that it's not a technical reason. It boils down to "Adobe are goddamn useless, let's just do their job for them because it will make our life a bit easier". There's no requirement for pdf viewing in the HTML spec or anything like that. It's not required for web browsing and it doesn't really have any place in the browser in a technical/engineering sense - from an "engineering purity" perspective these two things should be separate, even if you do like your pdf viewers written in javascript. The "correct/pure" engineering solution would have been for them to bundle their awful javascript pdf viewer in an electron(ish) app and release it as the "google pdf viewer", with all the requisite spam in gmail and the technical press, and to have chrome default to it if it's installed. Hell, you could make it a separate application and still bundle it with chrome. There must have been a LOT of support enquiries about "the adobe doesn't work" for it to survive a cost/benefit analysis for implementing an entire pdf viewer. That's not a trivial piece of work that somebody churned out in an afternoon (despite the performance of the thing feeling like it ;) ) If I was that product manager, I would not make that decision lightly. First I'd have built a special page into my support area that redirects the user to adobe.com/support if they type "pdf" or "adobe" into the "search support" bar. (You know what I mean - you've seen it in action on help desk sites where they try to fob you off rather than just giving you a "contact us" box straight away). This is all a whole lot easier to implement than a pdf viewer. In fact if you're using something like zendesk you get it for free. For me to decide to build a pdf viewer into my browser, I'd have to be getting a high volume of support emails about it after I'd implemented the change above. I don't think that's what happened. In the post i largely ignored, you said: >Multiple web browsers have embedded PDF viewers because the PDF viewing experience for most people sucked so much Allow me to give you an alternate explanation / interpretation, which I admit might come across as "a little bit cynical" or paranoid, but which I believe to be more fully borne out by the facts than the "cost/benefit analysis" theory you advocate. I don't think "multiple browsers" did that at all. Here's my theory: 1. Google decided to build a pdf viewer into chrome because they were busy trying to turn chrome into an operating system (see also: chrome os), and they knew that would mean including a pdf viewer, since a pdf viewer is a fairly essential tool for an operating system if it wants any kind of mainstream adoption. This had the added side-effect that for many users their pdf viewing experience would improve, because adobe are basically incapable of doing software. So it was really a "two-fer" for google. 2. Mozilla, seeing google's announcement for a pdf viewer built into their browser, did what Mozilla has been doing for the past decade: copy Chrome without giving any thought at all to any of the considerations you and I are discussing today. Or indeed any consideration other than "what is google doing with chrome this week?". Now, I do try to keep my paranoia and cynicism in check, but to me this seems like a far more likely explanation. Perhaps I'm wrong. It would be kind of nice if I was. If you have some data to support your theory I'd love to see it. I don't have much data to back up my theory. I can't be bothered looking into what chrome's support site was like pre-pdf-support. But I do have one data point: I can confirm that chrome added pdf support first, with Mozilla aping them almost immediately (they were pretty much at parity within a year or two). Maybe Mozilla had coincidentally already done a full cost/benefit analysis of adding a pdf viewer before google went live with theirs. It's not impossible. But it seems a little unlikely to me. </rant> ;)