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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

I am quite happy with the pdf.js default viewer, which does not have react dependencies and does not need to download a meg or two to work. It does not require me to allow all kinds of scripts from the website or even third party scripts from random CDNs. It also does not need a purchase of a license. It has so far always been snappy for me.

So unless the feature set of this is so unimaginably great, that it completely revolutionizes PDF viewing, I doubt, that I will ever have a use for it. Maybe a PDF reading focused website could offer it as an alternative viewer, while obviously still preserving the option to view in the standard PDF viewer. Maybe that would make sense then for people, who need it fancier.

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How can you call yourself a web developer when your PDF viewer doesn't even require 2 GB of RAM. This is the future, old man.

One day, each window, page, tab -- and even individual elements of the web page -- will run in its own docker container. Imagine all the clock cycles we could harness.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

Please don't give people ideas..

One day we will discover React is a deeply advanced cryptomining scheme.

Who’s gonna notice if your webassembly renderer uses 10% of its time to render crypto? You could even use their gpu…

It could become a kind of licensing condition or similar, that you have to allow it, in order to use it. And then uninformed tech decisions force you to use such crap at the job, all while you know, that your development machine is mining ... What a nightmare.

This is just a bunch of UI bits on top of PDF JS.

Pretty rich, considering they're licensing this commercially.

This borderline seems like a license trap: use common keywords as your package name to boost visibility, post it on NPM (with the license truncated so much as to be useless[1]), and then wait for an unsuspecting developer to pull in the package so you can file suit.

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@react-pdf-viewer/core

[1] On a 4K screen, the most I can see of it is "https://react-pdf-vie..."

I would rather render PDF with a native app either as provided by the computer or device or the built in one in Chrome or similar.

The reason for that is that we tried pdf.js earlier this year and it is very CPU/mem hungry once you go past simple PDF's it becomes noticable.

Also rendering 5-6 single page PDF's in the same web page made Safari bog down.

> I would rather render PDF with a native app either as provided by the computer or device or the built in one in Chrome or similar.

This is what PDF.js is...

> PDF.js is built into version 19+ of Firefox.

https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

Sure, if they optimized it for Firefox and it runs natively there, that's fine and all. But what about all the other browsers? My point still stands.

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