131–140 of 200 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PDF performance is great on the Mac because Apple's 2d drawing system is actually based on the PDF spec. You can even "print" to a pdf from just about any Mac application that supports printing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
just a note, but you can do that in linux and afaik windows as well
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please take your time machine and go release PDF.js in early 2010. With good performance on the hardware and Javascript VMs of early 2010. Then I'll grant you the criticism of Chrome's PDF viewer. Otherwise, trolling... fact is, Chrome is the browser that liberated the world from Acrobat Reader. PDF.js is awesome and it may be the way to go, but as of today Chrome's viewer is still much better -- please try http://ww…
Bollocks. Chrome's PDF implementation absolutely sucks. I have numerous PDF documents which it can't handle at all. I've just opened them in Firefox 19 and they are absolutely spot on. I'm uninstalling Acrobat reader for a week to see how it goes now. Chrome never gave me that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just a matter of open/closed source. Bundling in yet another C binary is only going to widen the surface area for security vulnerabilities for millions of people, and there's really not a great reason to do so anymore. PDF.js proves that it's possible to write high-performance javascript to do this stuff, without introducing any security risks and it's completely cross-platform. Computers are only going to g…
But Chrome's works better and has been around (and useful for millions) for years. Perhaps they'll move to a JS solution in the future, but if I had to choose between the two right now I'd take the faster more complete one.
It's worth pointing out this is done in pure Javascript , and works by compiling PDF functions to equivalent Javascript functions which are then visible to Firefox's JIT. Despite being only around a year old, it still manages to render the majority of PDFs thrown at it (it's been my primary paper reader for the past 6 months or so). As for missing features like some complex gradients, I can't say I've missed them, ex…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> To be sure, Safari is invoking a system level PDF reader to handle inline PDFs. That's what gets you that silky performance and nice rendering. Which, IMO, is the way it should be, and not just for PDFs. I'm impressed by the fact that Mozilla implemented a capable PDF reader in JavaScript, but I won't be using it. Firefox and Chrome are both trying too hard to duplicate everything my OS already provides: their own…
The main problem I see with that is security. PDF is a huge attack surface, reducing that to the already existing and well tested javascript surface is a huge win. Ideally (in my mind) every browser will come to use Mozilla's pdf implementation.
The Firefox PDF reader is very slow compared to Chrome's.
Also, the second and subsequent PDF files you click on do not commence the display at the top of the page, the appear to commence display somewhere down the page, I'm guessing maybe at the position that the previous PDF scrolled to. So immediately you need to pull the scrollbar back to the top before you can start reading the PDF.
So for now, just on speed alone we'll pass on the Firefox PDF reader.
It's worth pointing out this is done in pure Javascript , and works by compiling PDF functions to equivalent Javascript functions which are then visible to Firefox's JIT. Despite being only around a year old, it still manages to render the majority of PDFs thrown at it (it's been my primary paper reader for the past 6 months or so). As for missing features like some complex gradients, I can't say I've missed them, ex…
Good job!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PDF viewer in Chrome is available to Chromium users (just copying the libpdf.so or libpdf.DLL file into the appropriate directory works); it's just not open source.
I think for most people, when they say "available," they mean "without copyright infringement."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not against your main point but I am sure that Microsoft will provide at least 110% of funding if Google pulled their "funding".
If Microsoft were willing to provide pay as much or more, why aren't they doing it already to make Bing the default search engine?
Plus, there are probably some advantages to having Google 'on side'.