You mean instead of just downloading the file? Or does Preview support opening PDF links.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/quicklook/qlpreviewcon...
I got tired of having Adobe Updater constantly running in the background (why not a scheduled task run periodically like Google Updater?!) and the need to update/reboot my PC regularly when a new version of Acrobat came out.
I switched PDF viewers briefly but ended in the same update cycles I was in with Adobe.
PDF.js isn't perfect but I've yet to come across a PDF that it couldn't open for me. I use it mainly to view things like insurance bills or other random documents where pixel perfect rendering is irrelevant.
I would love to do as you say, and read pdfs in the browser only. From what I have learned in the context of this discussion, switching away from pdf.js will contribute to enabling that.
As a counterpoint, I regularly read (CS) research papers in pdf.js and have never had any trouble. One of the reasons I stuck with Firefox is the superior Zotero integration.
I'm sure ymmv depending on what kind of PDFs you use and how often; I'm on the lower end.
It did the trick for me on macOS Sierra.
YMMV
Have to admit I find it pretty damn useful myself, even though I believe PDFs to be completely out of scope of a web browser.
I really wish the format would disappear. Everybody says it's useful at being a "perfect digital representation of what things look like on paper", which is certainly super useful for printing. But I cannot understand how so much information that should simply be distributed in either HTML (forms), epub (ebooks) or jpg/png (scans and digital images) is distributed over PDF, a pain-in-the-arse, overengineered format whose readers are always extremely slow and riddled with security issues and from which it's extremely hard to extract source data.
I'm talking about where pdf is used and shouldn't be.
So the options are to either keep developing Shumway but not ship it, or stop developing it and not ship it. The latter is a bit more attractive if resources are limited.
Mozilla is an organization that needs to be careful about allocating their resources. These projects are open-source and with enough interest they can continue. If Mozilla's Persona died, that's because it never had a future in the first place and killing it was the right call ;-)
And on Hello and Pocket, I really don't understand the drama. I think the Internet is making some of us way too pissy.
Shumway hasn't been worked on in a while. No idea why, but I would guess that it has something to do with how large the Flash feature set is. Long tail and all that.
The reasoning here is probably like so (speculating here):
- We want to deprecate most plugin APIs
- We still want to support flash
- Shumway isn't there yet, let's use pepper flash
- Flash and PDF probably need very similar feature sets as far as the API is concerned
- Supporting the subset of PPAPI needed for Flash is probably going to let us include PDFium too, which is already supported by Google. As long as we're going down this path, let's try to include PDFium too.
- In case PDFium turns out to work, we can decide if pdf.js needs to be replaced
I personally hope that pdf.js isn't replaced; since a JS thingy is far better than a vulnerability-ridden C program. At the same time, this depends on how much the demand for a full pdf feature set is.
OTOH, this probably means more work gets done on Gecko, Servo, the *Monkeys, and Rust. Which is pretty good.
Well, does it? Are they moving devs from PDF.js to the Rust ecosystem? It seems more likely to me that they would either lay them off, or move them to the PDFium stuff. Same applies to Shumway.
What a backwards step either way. As for Servo, how's it doing these days? Is it anywhere near done? What terrifies me is Mozilla would drop Servo when it's 80% done, just like it did with all its other projects, because "well, we already have Gecko, and it works, and it's too much work to finish Servo".
Aside from Rust and some Firefox tech, I haven't seen anything concrete come out of Mozilla in a long, long time. Rust, FWIU, has its own organization and is no longer handled by Mozilla alone (thank god); everything else gets killed off like a westerosi wedding.
Initially, PDFium was pitched as a freebie if we added support for chromium's flash and then we'd also get improved PDF printing and form support. However, the amount of effort that has gone into supporting PDFium is already far beyond what it would have taken to improve PDF.js form support and help improve Firefox's printing (which would have benefited the web in general). Though, this is my very biased opinion as I was tech lead of PDF.js.
I was wrong, Mozilla isn't in a free-fall. They hit the ground and are now digging the grave to bury themselves in.
Steady progress as always! You can follow along with This Week in Servo at https://blog.servo.org/ :)
Recently we just added flexbox support and the Fetch API, just to name two of many.
Patterns are scary.
Why on earth would they move away from PDF.js (which is a fantastic project) and then use that move to justify Mortar?
Also, I just learned this from the thread: Why the fuck would they kill Shumway? I'm all for killing Flash, but Shumway is an important tool not just for migration, it's also really important for archival.
God damn it Mozilla. I've talked about this before, too: Hearing Mozilla executives, each Mozfest, talk about commitment to the free web. Commitment to open technologies. What commitment, exactly?
In a handful of years, Mozilla has managed to severely damage its poster child web browser's reputation by including then subsequently dropping drm, by including then subsequently dropping Hello (a good initiative with a horrible user experience), by completely screwing up the launch of Pocket (which they could only have done by massively misunderstanding their userbase).
In that same handful of years, Mozilla took some good initiatives, such as Persona and Firefox OS, completely botched marketing and experience on both, severely underestimated the required efforts on the latter, then dropped both projects.
In that same handful of years, Mozilla dropped support for its second poster child, Thunderbird, arguably the last decent FOSS email client.
It all screams mismanagement and I haven't even talked about half of the problems. I've been upset about all this for some time but now writing it all out I'm starting to wonder of Mozilla isn't just in a free fall.
PS: I 100% understand the concerns and difficulties of allocating development time but this is a pattern I keep seeing with Mozilla: Spin up a project, get it to 80%, give up. You could build a castle with the amount of efforts wasted on projects either doomed from the beginning (FxOs), or dropped near the finish line. This is all absurd.