Firefox 19 Beta Brings JavaScript-Based PDF Viewer

[MaxToTheMax]

Originally I thought it was just supposed to be an experiment, to see what kinds of problems there were creating a complicated program to run in the browser. I'm not sure when they decided to actually make it the default.

But the basic reasoning goes like this -

1. The job of a web browser is to show documents (html,xml,etc.) so why does it pass off pdf documents to an external program? Let's just have the browser handle it natively.
2. A pdf viewer written in javascript will increase security - it's a managed language, and the browser is already hardened against attacks that could come through js, while external viewers are often out of date and we can't know whether they are secure or not.
3. Loading the pdf directly in the browser should be faster than launching an external program to do it. Better integrated/less likely to cause problems in the browser too.

All three of these arguments make good sense to me. Also, JS isn't really that slow these days; we're stuck with it as a standard, so huge amounts of engineering effort have gone into making it fast. I don't think the idea of a built-in JS PDF viewer is a defective one, and it could be made to perform well. It just isn't finished yet, IMO.

[smitty3268]

Why don't they use a plugin, like Chrome does? (And it's very fast.) JavaScript is for web pages, not for the browser. Sounds kind of stupid what Mozilla is doing.

Originally I thought it was just supposed to be an experiment, to see what kinds of problems there were creating a complicated program to run in the browser. I'm not sure when they decided to actually make it the default.

But the basic reasoning goes like this -

1. The job of a web browser is to show documents (html,xml,etc.) so why does it pass off pdf documents to an external program? Let's just have the browser handle it natively.
2. A pdf viewer written in javascript will increase security - it's a managed language, and the browser is already hardened against attacks that could come through js, while external viewers are often out of date and we can't know whether they are secure or not.
3. Loading the pdf directly in the browser should be faster than launching an external program to do it. Better integrated/less likely to cause problems in the browser too.

1 and 2 make some sense to me, even if there probably are other ways to attack these issues as well. I don't think they're quite there on #3 yet, though.

Edit: https://people.mozilla.com/~cjones/P...japan-2012.pdf

[RealNC]

Why don't they use a plugin, like Chrome does? (And it's very fast.) JavaScript is for web pages, not for the browser. Sounds kind of stupid what Mozilla is doing.

[MaxToTheMax]

I'm running the nightly Firefox build. I've actually had to turn the builtin PDF reader off. It's too slow.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 19 Beta Brings JavaScript-Based PDF Viewer

For those not busy playing around with the Snowshoe web-browser, the beta of Mozilla Firefox 19.0 has been released and is ready for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI3Mjg