Firefox 119 unleashes PDF prowess and Sync sorcery | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 119 unleashes PDF prowess and Sync sorcery

theregister.com

33 pointslproven24 comments

The tone and hype in the article is a little bit dramatic for my tastes, but at the same time I'm happy that PDFs can be now annotated in Firefox. This is an incredibly useful feature.

I wrote it as well as submitted it.

(I do not, FWIW, write or choose the headlines.)

I am puzzled. In what way do you find it "dramatic"?

I had the same reaction and it’s “sorcery” that did it for me.

I guess he went for attractive alliteration.

always attempt attractive alliteration

Again: I don't write the headlines. I do give my stories headlines, but more often than not the editors write their own and I have no control over that. They are much more experienced than me in writing snappy headlines that attract readers, which is not my job.

So no, I did not go for it. I do use judiciously alliteration and all sorts of things, sure, but my headlines are rarely used, so they'd be in the body copy, not the titles or subtitles.

I initially had a reaction to the page content, but upon second read it actually seems okay. I think then, my reaction was to some title keywords ("unleash" "prowess" "sorcery"), which then spilled over mentally into the content.

It's otherwise a good article with nice links to further reading.

Like I said: I don't write, or choose, the headlines. None of those words occur in the article itself.

(The word "unleash" occurs in the headline to a story of mine that is linked from this one in the automatically-generated backlinks section. I used words like "thread" and "labyrinth" when trying to riff upon the Minotaur codename for Ubuntu 23.10. I guess the sub-editors picked up on that. I don't think the original Minotaur myth involves leashes.)

Thanks for the comment. I do try to write useful, informative stuff, so it worries me when people react negatively to it.

Firefox is pretty good these days, but I'm not sure about all of this feature creep. Seems like much of this could just live as extensions.

The one place where I wish they'd invest would be in getting AEC (audio echo cancellation) up to par so I could use Firefox for my WebRTC calls at work.

The PDF features are actually an extension, just one built in as Firefox's default pdf viewer.

It's called pdf.js https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/

You can actually use this pdf viewer in another browser like Chrome if you'd like, there's a demo URL on there.

That's just abusing the term. If it's built-in, and written by the same team, in what way is it "extension"?

I don't believe it's abuse of the term, it's not part of Firefox's source code -- as far as I'm aware it's literally a web extension that's batched in after build time.

It also exists in isolation with exactly the same featureset on the demo link on that README page.

With regards to "written by the same team", from the same file:

> PDF.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla.

Glancing at the contributors, the vast majority of the additions have come from (in order of most to least) a Google developer, an unidentifiable internet rando, two mozilla devs and someone who works for a Dutch IT firm.

Ok, that's fair. It's more than just "using the extension API" like I suspected. Thanks!

At a previous gig I was working on a web app where there was a requirement for users to be able to "view PDFs without downloading them" (the product person's words, not mine, and they probably got it from somebody in security). I explained that such a thing was technically impossible as the act of rendering the PDF in the browser meant that the computer would have to download it. "There's no way to remove the download button?" they asked in response. No, there wasn't, because each browser would use its own PDF viewer or open the document in one installed on the machine. What if we used our own renderer instead though? After thinking for a second I remembered that PDF.js was a thing in Firefox... would it run in other browsers? Sure enough it did. I was able to fork it, remove save functionality (just a button and a context menu IIRC), and rig it up to load a PDF from our server.

The demo ran great in IE and Chrome, the two browsers that we had to support. Everybody seemed satisfied with this solution and called it a day. I have no idea whether this made it to production as I left shortly thereafter, but the fact that it passed muster didn't leave me with a great feeling.

The stupider solution would probably be converting the PDF to an image on the server and sending that to the browser.

Also available on Chromium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...

SurfingKeys browser extension does (or used to) bundle this extension

https://github.com/brookhong/Surfingkeys

So PDF annotation is nice, but I don't understand what the actual improvement to the sync feature supposed to be?

Maybe they finally sync search engines between devices?

edit: No, after 16 years, still can't have custom search engines on all your devices. But hey, at least we can drop images onto PDFs. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444284

[Author/submitter here]

There is a button in the tab bar that lets you pick up tabs from your other devices. This uses the Mozilla Sync functionality that also syncs bookmarks, login IDs, passwords and extensions between browsers.

Now the "tabs on other devices" functionality has its own name: Mozilla View.

I actually quite like it and am already finding it useful. I don't use their tab bar, though, so I added a button to the extensions menu.

Are the account data end to end encrypted? What data does Mozilla hand over in the event of a subpoena or data center raid?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/how-firefox-sync-keeps-your-...

Does this mean Firefox extensions can now interact with PDFs? Previously this wasn't possible. Anyone know?

I don't think so. It means the PDF renderer _is_ an extension. Maybe it's possible to write extensions for that extension? Extensions for other extensions are already a thing and TreeStyleTabs uses them.

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