Firefox: Announcing Project Mortar
I wish more of the world considered PDF and Flash to be obsolete&#x2F;deprecated technologies. The amount of energy wasted on these rotten old techs is such a shame.<p>That said, if someone has to do it, I felt better about PDF.js than I feel about the Chrome implementation, for a few reasons. Higher level language means less surface area for vulnerabilities (though I guess it&#x27;s never been perfect, either). Being a huge and complex project in JavaScript means it works the JS engine and renderer in the browser pretty hard and can provide a great test suite for the browser itself. Being JavaScript also means improvements in the VM (whether performance or security) automatically improve the PDF renderer (though I guess PDFium is quite a bit faster already, so that&#x27;s less of a benefit on the PDF.js side).<p>Honestly, though, these are dead technologies, to me. I use them only when absolutely <i>necessary</i>. I don&#x27;t have Flash installed on any of my machines and have no intention to do so. I do have to look at PDFs now and then, but I don&#x27;t like it. I&#x27;m tired of people slapping the paper skeuomorph onto web pages. Web pages are <i>better than paper</i>, in every dimension, so stop imitating paper! Having to load up a buggy, quirky, weird-looking, plugin to view the damned thing is just adding insult to injury.<p>So...let&#x27;em die. But, I guess if Mozilla feels like they need to keep providing it for now, I&#x27;m fine with them doing whatever they have to do to make it cost as little as possible. Mozilla has wasted enough money over the years on weird projects; I guess supporting Flash and PDF count as another one. (Even though I like PDF.js a lot, for making PDF less of an asshole.)