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Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

support.mozilla.org

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Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#51

Post by inetknght »

cptskippy wrote: post #27
marvindanig wrote: post #17

Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.

> It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. It is easy to criticize something when you don't look back at the historical context through which it emerged. It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.

> It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.

Can you discuss some of the advantages? The only advantage that comes to mind is that Apple has built-in support for writing PDFs and that has a lot to do with Adobe rather than PDF being a better candidate.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#52

Post by toyg »

marvindanig wrote: post #17

Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill on a piece of technology that should be done away with? PDF is a dork. It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. Somewhere in the comments below, it is mentioned that supporting PDFs is a non-trivial piece of technology. May be! Even steam engines have non-trivial technology under the hood.

> Why is Firefox spending all their money and goodwill

I doubt "all" their money goes towards the pdf-reader bit. And tbh, I'd say nobody will really lower their goodwill towards Mozilla because they add features that a lot of people actually need.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#53

Post by Hamuko »

inetknght wrote: post #50
rpastuszak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package, so in a way—yes.

> it's a PDF reader that doesn't come with a tracking package Uh, what? Firefox supports javascript. PDFs support javascript. Javascript empowers tracking.

Firefox PDF support is actually Javascript.

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#54

Post by marvindanig »

f1refly wrote: post #31
marvindanig wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?

Distributing a document with functioning kerning and embedded fonts that works offline

Serviceworkers+@font-faces+font-kerning property of CSS3. Done, next.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#55

Post by toyg »

inetknght wrote: post #51
cptskippy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an accessibility nightmare with no obvious advantage over simple ordinary webpages. It is easy to criticize something when you don't look back at the historical context through which it emerged. It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them.

> It has plenty of advantages over HTML but they're easy to dismiss if you don't have a use case for them. Can you discuss some of the advantages? The only advantage that comes to mind is that Apple has built-in support for writing PDFs and that has a lot to do with Adobe rather than PDF being a better candidate.

PDF prints infinitely better than HTML, and it can be somewhat hardened against modification by average users.

If you think MSOffice users would prefer to output HTML over PDF, you don't live in the same corporate world I inhabit.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#56

Post by est31 »

axelf4 wrote: post #35
elric wrote: post #34

That built in PDF viewer is another feature that could have been an addon. It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. It's completely unneeded given that just about every OS ships with some kind of PDF reader out of the box.

> It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. AFAICT PDF.js is just another JavaScript application and thus as sandboxed as any other website.

It's a js application and thus less exploitable than your average C application with tons of unsound code, but IIRC it belongs to the class of "privileged js" layer that Firefox has, so has special rights that usual website js doesn't have.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#57

Post by marvindanig »

cptskippy wrote: post #30
marvindanig wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone working on formats, I disagree with your generalization. But let's get into specifics. List the things about PDF that you believe can't be done with web pages?

It's easy to dismiss things in their entirety and then require someone else to "prove you wrong". Why don't you prove you're right instead? Why don't you list all of things that PDFs can do that can also be done with web pages?

Sure, here's my list: everything + more.

There's nothing a PDF can do that a webpage can't. In fact there are a hundred of things that a webpage can do, but a PDF can't. Including, form fields, input fields and seamless form submissions.

Webpages can also do this: https://bubblin.io/cover/official-handbook-by-marvin-danig#f...

Disclosure: It's my work.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#58

Post by toyg »

elric wrote: post #34

That built in PDF viewer is another feature that could have been an addon. It's bloat which increases the browser's attack surface. It's completely unneeded given that just about every OS ships with some kind of PDF reader out of the box.

Thank Google - Chrome was the first browser to ship with a pdf reader, and people loved it. Now it's just expected that any browser should have a workable PDF reader built-in.

Re: Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms

#59

Post by _coveredInBees »

Sheesh, what's with the hate for a generally all-round useful feature in an Open source browser? The last thing I want is to have to install 3rd-party software on my machine and have my browser be held hostage to it just to view PDF documents on the web. Being able to fill them in is a very useful feature and the in-browser PDF readers are still way less bloated than most other plugins.
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