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Comment by rustyhancock | Hacker News Reader

> It is now possible to merge multiple PDFs by dragging a PDF into the PDF sidebar.

> It is now possible to add images as new pages within PDFs using the Firefox PDF editor.

I have always found it odd that browsers are also PDF editors increasingly.

Many URLs start with http(s): and end in .pdf. If we define web browser as http browser rather than html browser, then viewing PDFs fits the concept. My web browser also displays plain text, video, audio, etc., so http browser seems accurate and html browser plainly inadequate.

And regardless of logical fit for geeks (who understand the paragraph above), users clicking a .pdf URL may find it much more convenient if it just opens in their browser like any other http page, rather than downloading, opening in another window, getting lost between the MDI browser and separate SDI of the PDF file, etc. Why not treat PDF as just another web format?

To me, more strange is Firefox adding PDF editing features to its core, rather than as add-ons. Users can't edit HTML or any other media without extra tools. Many pdf reader apps can't do some of these things (afaik). Why invest developer time in PDF editing?

Users absolutely can edit HTML/CSS/JS without any other tools. That's what the entire dev-tools section of the browser is about.

Dev tools are not for 99% of end users and not realistically available to them (even if they stumble across dev tools, they don't know what they've found or how to use them). PDF editing is for end users and is realistically available.

That seems like all the more reason it's worthwhile. If they're going to invest in the tools for 1% of their users, why wouldn't they invest in tools for 50% of their users?

It's odd and I'm not sure I love it compared to a nicely-done dedicated viewer (macOS Preview, SumatraPDF, whatever comes with GNOME or KDE).

That said, I'll pick the in-browser tools over Adobe Reader every time.

It's better than any of them for random bullshit you've found somewhere on the internet since it provides a far stronger security boundary than any standalone pdf reader. For trusted documents, I agree.

That's not a fair comparison. The first one gives you space to stretch your legs, the other once stretches your legs on a medieval rack.

I prefer the Firefox PDF viewer personally, and now that it can do all this I uninstalled the default Ubuntu PDF reader recently. It made me think and I uninstalled the image viewer app too. For both I'd rather use Firefox.

> nicely-done dedicated viewer

The problem is the edge cases. PDF has lots.

In $DAYJOB-1 we used PDFs as part of the official feedback process for technical documentation: subject-matter experts sent their comments as PDF annotations. Most FOSS viewers can't show them.

Form filling also is a tricky area. Conversion, searching, accessibility tools (screenreaders often can't read PDFs), comments, annotations, editing, all these and more are significant functional weaknesses for the free viewers.

That's setting aside the really fancy stuff, like 3D objects, video, media content, etc.

Even so PDF viewers are big and complicated things so smaller distros pick up tools from alien desktops -- e.g. KDE's Okular, which I find fugly but can handle comments, or GNOME's weird crippled UI in Evince or Papers, with no menu bars etc., but which is Gtk so you find it in many Gtk desktops.

It wasn't hard for the Firefox viewer to outdo 90-95% of the free viewers because the free viewers only do the dead basic stuff, and that kept Acrobat Reader alive on other OSes -- even though the last Linux one is version 9, from 2008.

Oh yeah. Once or twice a year I have to install Adobe Reader to handle some weird edge case around printing, DRM, or the like. I usually uninstall it right afterward.

But for general document reading, Reader's UI has been awful for years. The amount of unnecessary toolbars, popups, upsell offers, and (recently) AI assistant recommendations pile up and block the one thing I actually want the app to do.

PDF got attached to the browser when the browser needed a printing mechanism that worked in JS. PDF.js was the best approach. Creating PDFs is also part of the same approach. And merging PDFs is part of the same approach. PDF is now a first class child of the web.

I think in case of Firefox it's done purely with JS (https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/), no native code.

So that feels fine (assuming it runs in same sandbox like any page), just bundled HTML/JS being changed.

No, it's still a weird scope creep. Browsers can view a lot of things (HTML document, various pictures, sounds, videos), but they don't typically include editing functionality.

Browsers can fill out forms. Many forms are (unfortunately) PDFs, especially for orgs that are struggling to digitize (govts...). PDFs which then need to be filled out.

So this seems to make a lot of sense to me and I'll be glad to have the functionality, especially when PDF functionality is such a mess in the general world (lots of barely-working software).

<html contenteditable> has existed since IE 5.5, and was standardized in the first version of HTML5.

https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable

> they don't typically include editing functionality.

Not true. The original Mozilla Internet Suite was a combined browser, email/newsgroups client, and web-page editor. It was an open-sourced version of Netscape Communicator which did the same things. Seamonkey is the modern fork.

Firefox is the result of a project to cut down the Mozilla suite to something smaller, simpler and more focused, but its parent program and direct ancestor edited text, HTML, and did other read/write stuff like messaging, calendaring, etc.

The first web browser was also an editor (albeit not for PDFs). Accessible editing was a part of was Berners-Lee's vision for the web.

> The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web.[1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

I stand by the statement. Modern browsers typically do not include all that functionality. For instance, consider... well, as you say - Firefox supposedly was the cut down version that didn't include all that stuff. If Mozilla wants to make seamonkey a major part of their product suite, I'd be basically on board with that, but that thing's niche.

It's an editor, just one that you can program in JavaScript.

Remember WordPerfect? When you press F12 in Firefox, you have essentially the same thing as the reveal codes pane in WP.

This seems like an arbitrary line to draw. Should your photo viewing software also not provide editing tools? If it's useful, why not?

I think it's a function of the endless tussle between browser-as-an-OS and the OS they run on. For example, I absolutely hate that there's no option in Firefox to only use the OS print dialog. Instead I am force to click print, then click "use system print dialog" every time. I seems to remember reading a bug report where Firefox deemed this intentional and wontfix. After all, if you leave Firefox to print something, maybe you won't ever come back and start using your print dialog to surf the web!

print.prefer_system_dialog = true in about:config does what you want, i think.

Ooh, thanks! Will try that out.

Edit: yes it does - perfect!

Not odd until you try to open a PDF in Windows.

Does it work with the DRM stuff that can be in a PDF?

I have a PDF that I can't view at all.

I very much appreciate this when working on a computer that’s not mine.

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