Plugin allows inline PDFs for Firefox
tuaw.com
tuaw.com
Sure, when I used Acrobat, pdfs used to be slow and annoying and hard to highlight, etc. But it really seems like a problem that stopped existing a couple years ago.
Most Mac users would probably rather use the built-in PDF libraries, which form the basis of Mac OS X's graphics system. They are well implemented, fast, and work great without the mess of plugin chrome you get from Adobe Reader. And the output looks great.
It's all about preventing people from needing to context-switch into application-switching and file management just to view a document.
But yeah, I guess if OS X has good built in pdf support, why not use it, so I can see the appeal on those grounds.
Browsers need to go to the one-process-per-web-page model if they ever want to be taken seriously. The whole concept of multiple (possibly hostile) apps living in the same memory space is madness. If you keep finding vulnerability after vulnerability, guess what? You're doing it wrong. And with a decoupled, bare-bones approach to browsing advancements such as local inter-page communication become feasible, because the security model can be so much simpler.
Situation: 1 browser, N pdf-reader like plugins. Result: not only can vulnerabilities in the pdf-reader affect the browser, a vulnerability in, say, flash, can affect the pdf-reader. So every component can affect every other component. Good luck with that.
I agree that one-process-per-web-page is at least a good metaphor, but I'm not sure those necessarily have to be real OS processes. If the OS can keep processes from stepping on each other's toes, why can't the browser do the same thing for web pages on its own?