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Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

Off topic: but why do we always warn for PDFs? It's not as if they contain malware, crash phones or freeze your OS, is it?

I too add a "PDF Warning" to links most of the times, but have no idea why I should continue doing it, now that I think about it.

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I think it's because 10 years ago, clicking on a PDF would result in your computer loading an external program like Adobe Acrobat, Foxit which would normally be very slow. These days, PDFs will normally load in the browser which is much faster and more convenient.

I like PDF. They contain no ads, no javascript and no scroll-highjacking. I know what to expect and it 'just works'.

I thought that PDFs could contain JavaScript too!

They can but viewers don‘t execute them with very few exceptions (and even Adobe Reader has it disabled by default i think)

Chrome does and it may be one of the most popular viewers currently in use. If you've never seen it, I encourage everyone to try breakout.pdf [0]. I know it doesn't work in Firefox's viewer, but it does in Chrome's. And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like: an implementation of the classic Breakout game in PDF.

[0] https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments@...

Me too.

Slightly joking: Since PDFs can contain links, we could actually build a www with just PDFs. A www that has no trackers, no JS frameworks, just content. A content-first, prettily type-setted and gorgeously layout-ed web.

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