Firefox 19 Beta Brings JavaScript-Based PDF Viewer

[RealNC]

Well, since they don't care about performance, props to them, I guess.

Maybe they should rewrite Firefox and Gecko itself in JavaScript and then we'd run it inside Chrome.

[Ferdinand]

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.

Mozilla must be idiots right? They use javascript for the webpage, GUI, pdf, mp3, extensions, torrent, flash etc.

[Delgarde]

JavaScript is for web pages, not for the browser. Sounds kind of stupid what Mozilla is doing.

That's an odd thing to say, given that large parts of Firefox have been written in Javascript since day 1...

[willmore]

Obviously

If you're running it and in that menu, yes. Not obvious otherwise. But, thanks for the screen cap.

[smitty3268]

Every time Adobe Reader installs itself on a machine, it stuffs a plugin into each and every browser it can find. So, I have to go in and turn that off. I've been doing this for over a decade and I'm tired of it. Please tell me that it will be possible to turn this off and let .pdf files be downloaded instead.

Obviously -

[willmore]

Oh, no, not again

Every time Adobe Reader installs itself on a machine, it stuffs a plugin into each and every browser it can find. So, I have to go in and turn that off. I've been doing this for over a decade and I'm tired of it. Please tell me that it will be possible to turn this off and let .pdf files be downloaded instead.

[Linuxhippy]

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.

The problem is, the pdf isn't loaded "natively". The javascript does a pdf->html conversion. So for my understanding, it is implemented at the wrong level.

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.

Well, the problem could be solved by offloading pdf-rendering to a library like poppler. It is already there, open-source and really fast-

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.

Agreed =)

[randomizer]

Its far from finished. Load a big enough PDF file, (4-5MB) and the whole browser will freeze till the PDF is completely rendered.
Even after loading is complete, the scrolling, panning and zooming is ridiculously slow, specially on older hardware.
A pdf plugin renders the same pdf quite easily.

If you look at the HTML it generates you'll see why it's slow. Some PDFs will produce sub-par markup, and others are just horrendous. I just took a look at the Android 4.2 Compatibility Definition Document and every character (even whitespace) is a separate DIV with CSS transformations. Each page takes around 2 seconds to render and it's just text.

What annoys me about how it is configured is that it will only load pages as you scroll them into view. I'd rather it continue to load the whole document asynchronously.

[RealNC]

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

A plugin is not an external program. Chrome bundles a plugin for PDF viewing that doesn't open any external program. I believe it's a PPAPI plugin (just like their Flash plugin) so it should be sandboxed.

[mayankleoboy1]

Its far from finished. Load a big enough PDF file, (4-5MB) and the whole browser will freeze till the PDF is completely rendered.
Even after loading is complete, the scrolling, panning and zooming is ridiculously slow, specially on older hardware.
A pdf plugin renders the same pdf quite easily.