Mozilla's Project Mortar Wants Pepper API Flash & PDFium In Firefox

This week word of Mozilla's "Project Mortar" surfaced, which aims to explore the possibility of bringing the PDFium library and Pepper API based Flash plugin into Firefox. This project is being led by various Mozilla engineers.

Mozilla is so far developing Project Mortar in private while they plan to open it up in the future.

PDFium is the Google open-source project for PDF support in Google Chrome. PDFium was previously closed-source based upon Foxit PDF technology while now it's been fully open-source since 2014.

The Pepper API Flash implementation is also what's used by Google's Chrome web-browser. By switching to the PAPI-based Flash, Firefox would be able to finish getting rid of their NPAPI support with the Firefox Flash support still relying upon it with Shumway and other projects not panning out.

There is no guarantee that Project Mortar will come to fruition for bringing PDFium and Pepper API Flash to Firefox, but we should see in 2017... Those wanting to learn more now and a basic road-map can visit this Mozilla.org Wiki page.