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Comment by stuff4ben | Hacker News Reader

Why is this news except the fact that Chrome has had this for years? Was Adobe paying Mozilla in the same way that Google paid them for the search bar preference?

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Adobe was not paying Mozilla for anything like that. Chrome simply includes a paid closed-source product (FoxIt, iirc). This was and is not an option for Mozilla for multiple reasons.

It took Mozilla a while to get here, which is unfortunate, but the result is an open-source PDF reader that doesn't add yet another binary rendering engine to the browser (think security, hack-ability). Creating it made Gecko and the web platform better, because it pushed us. There is more work to do, but it's a great start and a welcome change to how these features are implemented.

A bit more info in a blog post that I wrote:

https://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/exciting-st...

Interestingly, there are also a prototype Flash in JavaScript called Shumway: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

And an IIUC a DOM renderer in JS https://github.com/andreasgal/dom.js/

I don't know if PDF.js will ever reach full PDF compatibility (with all it's weird forms and other stuff), but I do hope so. With a liberal licence I can totally see people embedding pdf.js to render their pdfs on site.

Chrome's support is based on a licensed copy of FoxIt reader that they bundle in their binary. This also means that Chromium doesn't support it. The Firefox one is all open-source, as well as being based on pdf.js.

I think the point is (from my other comment) this doesn't use a plugin, so is more secure (no Adobe security problems). It's based on pdf.js if you want to find out more.

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