[stingraycharles]

You're getting old and grumpy, Jacques, before you know it you will start your sentences with "back in the day..." :)

On a more serious note, I guess this is the toll we have to pay for innovation pushing. I can understand the reasoning behind writing everything in JS: it allows you to consolidate a lot of mechanisms in a single platform. Once you have that platform secure, any application you will write will (should?) be secure too.

Too bad that theory and practice are usually not the same, in practice..

[baghira]

I disagree that this is innovation.

What innovation and what benefits do I reap by using pdf.js? It's slower and has less features than okular. It's stuck inside a firefox window, so I cannot add a window rule for it (barring adding one for firefox in general).

The same holds on windows: why would I use pdf.js when there are faster, lighter pdf readers (e.g. sumatra) or the actual adobe acrobat reader and its eight bilions features? Heck, I've also noticed that many users will skim the file and then forget to save it, so it doesn't even help less tech savy users.

There are genuine improvement in the new web technologies, but they are mixed with a lot of stuff that simply does not belong there, and with the insufferable attitude "you can do in javascript, hence you should it in javascript" (I'm not criticizing you, eh, and there is some security argument to be made).

[anc84]

Everyone is punished for Windows' Adobe Reader. I never got it either. PDF is not a web format. I would not want to read doc files in my browser either. Evince(-light) starts up in milliseconds.

[randallsquared]

> PDF is not a web format.

Sure it is: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3778 ;)

> I would not want to read doc files in my browser either.

This doesn't make sense to me. Why should the viewer care about the implementation details of a document? If I click on a link to a document, I want to see the result in the browser, and I think that that's the correct default. Only if I'm clicking on something which produces something that isn't intended to be a document (an archive, for example) does opening another program make sense as the default.

[stingraycharles]

I agree with you that this innovation isn't a particulary good one. However, a single platform in a language that allows you develop and test rapidly (which, arguably, javascript is) is a consequence about the ever increasing push for innovation, which I can understand.

In addition to that, I am very glad that Chrome and Firefox ship with their own PDF readers and I don't have to deal with Adobe anymore to read a portable document format.

[vilhelm_s]

The benefit I guess is that it acts like any other webpage. If I click on a link to a pdf, that pdf replaces the page I was looking at. If I click on a link in the pdf, the target of the link replaces the current page. I can have them open in Firefox tabs just like every other thing I look at online.

[anonbanker]

printing from pdf.js in linux is a bit of a headache as well, compared to okular or evince. Usually takes about 10 times as long (no joke) to print a pdf from inside firefox.

[georgerobinson]

That's if it works at all! I've found that pdf.js fails to print entirely when the document is sufficiently large. For example, when printing a scanned white paper from 20+ years ago.

[leni536]

I have mupdf in firefox (iceweasel) using mozplugger. I could always set it up to not display pdfs, only downlad them, use mupdf through mozplugger or use the builtin pdf.js viewer. Having said that I'm not sure that mupdf is safer than pdf.js, but it's much faster.

[baghira]

I was debating the merit of having the pdf reader bundled and on by default, instead of having the pdf file downloaded like most other files. One can certainly change firefox's behaviour in the settings (unlike webgl).

[oldmanjay]

I disagree that you are the arbiter of defining what innovation is, and the rest of your comment is similarly far outside of the bounds of the applicability of your opinion.

[JustSomeNobody]

Writing a PDF viewer in JS isn't innovation. That word gets thrown around way to much. It's more like renovation.

[jacquesm]

The old is hard to avoid, I'll work on the grumpy :)