Re: Announcing Project Mortar

On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 1:38 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> The project will start by investigating how Firefox handles PDF
>> rendering
>
> more of the same stupid waste of resources, yet another pdf viewer in firefox ?..... what for ? .
>
> what are you people doing............?

First of all, please keep your feedback constructive. Insulting
language isn't helpful.

Second, judging by the responses in this thread, the motivation behind
this project isn't clear. I'm not involved with Project Mortar at all,
but I have heard a little about it, so I will try to explain it a bit.
I may not have the details 100% correct, but this is my understanding,
at least for the PDF part.

- Although viewing PDFs in the browser is useful, PDFs are not a
fundamental part of the web. Therefore, Mozilla would like to not have
to spend a lot of effort supporting them.

- Although PDF.js is a really cool project, despite a lot of effort it
still has two significant shortcomings: it is a little on the slow
side, and it doesn't support all PDF functionality, including
form-filling. Fixing those shortcomings would be a lot of work. (PDF
is a *huge* format.)

- PDFium already exists. It is faster than PDF.js and supports more
PDF functionality. One downside of it is that it's written in an unsafe
language, but it can be run in a sandbox which mitigates that.

- Therefore, Mozilla is looking at replacing PDF.js with PDFium. This
has two potential benefits: (a) users will have a better PDF-viewing
experience, and (b) in the long-run it will save effort, which
means Mozilla can expend more effort on core web technologies: HTML,
CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Hopefully that helps clear things up a bit.

Nick