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

[Dea1993]

when adobe makes a new version of flash they want pappi flash? this mozilla guys have no brains

NPAPI flash player (actually 23.x beta on linux) hasn't all feature of PPAPI flash.
has no DRM, no HW aceleration.
PPAPI is really better for features.

[Linuxhippy]

I wonder who decides all that stuff at Mozilla.

First, they invest heavily into pdf.js and actually making their users suffer (I've reported > 10 pdf.js bugs myself) - which is a great tech-demo but a horrible PDF viewer (rendering issues, slow, memory hog). Now they throw it away again and do what they should have initially done. And then there are of course projects like Firefox-OS, like it wasn't clear already that it would fail (like a lot of competiting solutions like webOS, blackberry 10, ....).

On the other side, *real* technical advancements like multi-process tabs (which are finally appearing) got very low priority (development was even halted for a few years) - development which would help to really make Firefox a better browser.

For me it is quite a dilemma. I really try hard to use Firefox on my Android device (Nexus 5x) - simply because I believe the web should be accessed by various clients and chrome has a few privacy "features" which can not turned off that annoy me. However unfortunately, Chrome seems to work so much better on this device for real-world browsing workload.

[Cape]

"No DRM" is a feature. You when you buy food and there's a "no artificial preservatives" tag? Same.

Anyway, I wonder who uses the embedded PDF viewer in either FF or Chromium? It's the first thing I disable when I install a browser. It's always going to be bad compared to an external full-featured reader.

And flash is dying fast thank god.

So it's really a waste of resources to enable PPAPI in my opinion...

[PuckPoltergeist]

NPAPI flash player (actually 23.x beta on linux) hasn't all feature of PPAPI flash.
has no DRM, no HW aceleration.
PPAPI is really better for features.

PPAPI is better for flash, as it seems it was mainly developed for this. At least this is the impression I've got from the explanations from the Mozilla devs.

[Mike Frett]

With the Chromification of Firefox, why not just use Chrome?

Seriously, they should go back to the UI of FF 3x or 2x. It was nice and clean. They should also stop adding features nobody wants like that Reader, Messenger and other junk.

[ossuser]

If Mozilla integrates PDF support, it will for sure become a major security risk.

You might want to check out the CCC presentation "OMG WTF PDF", found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY

Mozilla should not support PDF documents inside their Firefox browser code.

I would strongly question their motives if they will.

[Slartifartblast]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1306946

Alternatively see this on bug tracker:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729481#c83

I did open a thread a good few hours before Mikey did a piece.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/901757-big-dose-of-humble-pie-for-boris-zbarsky-pepper-flash-coming-to-firefox

[molecule-eye]

I use a Chromebook and for numerous reasons I find PDF.js to be way more usable than Chrome's default viewer that has no option for even simple stuff like structure view. I also found PDF.js to be way smooyher and faster scrolling documents despite the bashing of its performance here. This is on a Broadwell Celeron. Would not want to see Firefox switch to Chrome's PDF viewer.

[KellyClowers]

Embedded PDF viewers need to die in a fire, along with Flash. Both of these are idiotic ideas.

[DeepDayze]

Embedded PDF viewers need to die in a fire, along with Flash. Both of these are idiotic ideas.

Until Adobe offers Reader DC for Linux we are stuck with the ancient, barely supported Reader 9.5.5 which is really showing its age. A solid PDF reader that supports the latest PDF stuff that Adobe cooks up is something sorely needed for Linux.