Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#2> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!).
There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#3> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
Scary and also helpful. Over reaching telemetry bad. But pragmatic, anonymous, usage metrics? Maybe worked this time.
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#4> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
It would be possible to implement telemetry that would answer these questions in mostly unobjectionable fashion, but without more information one can see how this could be described as "scary". I certainly hope that forms aren't just being sent back home to Mozilla as-is. However, a monthly ping with statistics like "out of between 50 and 200 documents, between 10 and 50 of them used javascript" wouldn't harm anything. They could even add a random error to the statistics...
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#5To this day, I do not understand why it is practically impossible to simply rotate a PDF and save it in its rotated form without downloading some additional PDF application.
Edit: On Windows. I envy Preview in MacOS
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#6> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
What I find disturbing is that you are complaining about the included javascript in forms at this late a date. Where have you been for like the last fifteen years?
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#7Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#8> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
It would be possible to implement telemetry that would answer these questions in mostly unobjectionable fashion, but without more information one can see how this could be described as "scary". I certainly hope that forms aren't just being sent back home to Mozilla as-is. However, a monthly ping with statistics like "out of between 50 and 200 documents, between 10 and 50 of them used javascript" wouldn't harm anythin…
I often do not have a problem with the information telemetry collects: I take issue with the entitlement to it a new breed of awful app developers have. They think they have the right to use my device for information collection without my permission.
If Firefox occasionally showed me a report on some metrics it collected and asked me if I was okay sending it to Mozilla, I'd probably be fine with it. However, the choice to take it without my consent will always be opposed.
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#9Why is it that, a ~decade since MacOS started including forms and markups in their default PDF app (Preview) there still isn't a sane PDF editor for Windows? Chrome and Firefox's PDF viewers don't have editing, Edge has editing and forms but bonkers window management (sometimes PDFs open with Edge but not in an Edge window). Adobe Reader DC still tries to ship with malware, and is license-restricted. What gives?
Apple did it because they were the underdog 15-20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't give a shit. There's no realistic market opportunity for a small third party to get a sizeable amount of revenue either, with Adobe looming.
I kinda miss the early 90s when we actually had competing software "houses" with some financial muscle.
Re: Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer
#10> Thanks to our Telemetry, we discovered that many forms contain and use embedded JavaScript code (yes, that’s a thing!). There are two disturbing things in that sentence. At least the JavaScript I can see a reason for, it can check whether your input is correct and maybe autofill or things like that, and should of course be sandboxed. The telemetry part is more scary.
> The telemetry part is more scary.
There's a nice big section in the Firefox settings called "Firefox Data Collection and Use" that has some fairly fine-grained options for what data you feed back to Firefox. I have all of mine unchecked, but I could imagine that if I were more community-minded, or if I were interested in actively contributing to FF's development day-to-day (for example running on nightly builds) I would activate those.
FWIW, I do explicitly allow telemetry for the applications I buy licenses for and use for my work; it's in my best interest for those programs to be improved as efficiently as possible (and to have my use patterns be part of the corpus used to prioritize those improvements), and it makes it easier for me to report issues.