Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jakuv2000 | Hacker News Reader

Jakuv2000

I'm surprised that pdf.js is described as a "success". I don't think I've ever heard a user of it say anything good about it. Any time I have heard about it, it's always somebody else in the office cursing loudly about it taking forever to open a PDF, or that it locked up Firefox, or that it's rendering something improperly, or that they wanted Foxit Reader or some other app to open the PDF instead of Firefox. Just because it's integrated with Firefox doesn't make it a "success", as far as I'm concerned. Australis is bundled with Firefox, too, and it's almost universally hated.

View on HN

> Australis is bundled with Firefox, too, and it's almost universally hated.

My own anecdotal evidence is completely the opposite. I've never heard anything but praise. Being able to open pdfs right in my browser with no stupid plugins is downright heavenly. There's only a couple PDFs I've ever seen that made pdf.js choke. I absolutely love it and am very glad I don't have to mess with some external PDF viewer or annoying plug-in ever again.

Ditto. I'm happer with pdf.js than with my external acrobat pro. Also, it takes a few sessions to get used to it, but I don't see much of a difference in how I use FF with australis (i.e. its kinda good but nothing to think about too much)

I absolutely hate it. It only takes one or two PDFs that crash or freeze Firefox to install a completely separate viewer that is much better. It depends on how often it happens to you, but I probably had three crash or freeze type issues before I switched. I did have dozens of documents with invisible text (wrong styling in pdf.js) that messed it up for me, though.

I'm happy enough with PDF.js that I went out of my way to install it in Chrome (which is my primary browser for reasons).

I've had a few electronics datasheets that have cause PDF.js to fail on or run slowly but in the main i've found that it works perfectly well.

For the ones that do fail it's easy enough to download them and open them up in a different viewer.

One could argue that it was shipped in Firefox too early. But the performance and rendering quality/completeness has improved greatly since then.

("Initially flaky software improves over time" is a common story, albeit a boring one, and bad first impressions can be hard to shift.)

I'm always happy when it fires up and saves me having to switch to an external PDF viewer.

I've never had any real issues with pdf.js - I love it, to be honest. It's great not needing to have another Adobe plugin installed.

> Australis is bundled with Firefox, too, and it's almost universally hated

[citation needed]. remember that people bitching on web forums does not equal the general population's impression. firefox has extensive telemetry in the browser -- i'm certain that if australis hurt usage metrics, there'd be changes, or at least discussion in the mozilla community (which, of course, is essentially all publicly visible)

An objective look at Firefox's metrics show that it went from around 35% of the browser market a few years ago to under 10% today, and this number is still dropping. In addition, Firefox has almost no usage on mobile systems.

Those metrics tell us everything we need to know about Mozilla's efforts these past few years: people in general are not happy with them, to the post of abandoning Firefox.

Several things:

As of recently, that trend has finally stopped: Firefox has started gaining (very) small amounts of market share recently. The point where the speed of user attrition slowed down was actually slightly before the Australis launch, but after that, the development sped up considerably.

Thus, it looks like Australis helped substantially with winning back users.

Plus, a few years ago, the competition was essentially IE6/7. Not hard to gain market share against that. Now there are several great browsers to choose from. Which I'd say is a fantastic development, even though I work for Mozilla.

Finally, there are the billions of dollars that e.g. Google pours into advertising for Chrome, which might have something to do how market share developed.

I don't hate Australis, and I'd be surprised if that hatred is anywhere near universal, it's very Chrome-esque and people don't seem to have such a problem with that. What seems more likely is that you're hearing a vocal minority that hates it, I'd bet most people couldn't care less so long as it works.

You need to expand your universe.

PDF is pretty good and people generally like it and don't think twice that they're not using, say, adobe reader.

As for Australis, there were loud outcries when it happened (as it always does with big UI changes, see 3.x to 4) but it quieted down quite fast.

That's because "loud" doesn't equal majority and this vocal minority got used to, moved elsewhere or simply used some addon to keep things how they liked them.

pdf.js is better than a plugin in my opinion. It's probably not as good UX as a plugin at the moment, but pdf.js is pretty promising for the future.

Are your friends using late 2000s netbooks? I routinely open large PDFs (greater than 5mbs) with no problem. Firefox is very customizable if you don't like the Australis look you are free to change it. I use tree-style tabs personally. This comment is just unnecessary trolling.

My experience with excessively large PDFs is the same, albeit they are largely just text and tables with no complex vector graphics.

Are you sure those people are cursing PDF.js and not Adobe's Acrobat Reader? The terrible performance and security vulnerabilities in Acrobat Reader were a major motivation for Mozilla creating PDF.js in the first place.

That's because we have a habit of complaining more than praising. The 90% of the time it just works don't get a mention. Thought personally I use an external viewer (SumatraPDF on Windows)

Same here. It usually blocks, gives blocks instead of characters and has hiccups when switching pages.

I usually configure PDFs to be saved, so that I can enjoy a native PDF viewer instead.

Then let me be one of the first. I like pdf.js and Australis.

I don't like Australis but I like pdf.js.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com