[thristian]

I'm sad to see PDF.js go. The PDF spec is ~12K pages long, and most of those pages describe things I don't want my PDF viewer to support, like embedded Flash, in much the same way I don't want my browser to support Flash.

PDF.js is at a very comfortable nexus of compatibility and efficiency, and I kind of wish I could use it for non-web-PDFs as well (but not so much that I want to put it in an Electron wrapper).

[Caspy7]

PDF.js isn't "going" per se, but its lack of inclusion and development may certainly take wind out of its sails. It should still be possible as a PDF viewer in the browser (as an addon). And I think you can already use it (inside Firefox) to view non-web-PDFs.

[indolering]

I totally agree that we shouldn't be throwing random PDFs at that pile of C++ code, but I'm not sure there is much of an alternative.

I'm not personally familiar with those internals, but from my past life in the print industry it took decades for print controllers to reliably handle native PDFs. And it's still not a sure thing[0].

And it's not a stationary spec, it's in Adobe's best interest to keep throwing in new features so they can license new versions of their software. It's literally a rehash of the old school office suite document formats.

Google is willing to cover those development costs because they need it for Android, ChromeOS, and Google Docs. So let them pay for it. This is doubly true if (as I suspect) this becomes the de-facto FOSS PDF implementation.

0: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/micro...