this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Remember when we needed to use Adobe Reader (or maybe Okular etc.) to view PDFs?
I think it is a very good thing that we can now do that in the web browser.
That was 20 years ago. Numerous PDF readers has surfaced since then.
PDF is not like HTML.PDF is a messy standard where you need Adobe products to support all the shit that a PDF could contain. There is no open source product that for example fully support PDF forms and therefore Mozilla won't either.
All in saying is that Firefox is a web browser and not a document viewer. Since Mozilla would go bankrupt in two hours if Google stopped showing them with a shitload of money, Mozilla would be wise to focus on the core.
So if Google were to stop paying Mozilla for us to be able to use Firefox for free, we're all running Chrome.
So what do you suppose an HTML document is?
Hint: the clue is in the name.
2nd hint: the first line of any well formed HTML file.
You obviously know very little about PDF since you're trying to put it on the same level as HTML.
The PDF files that we see in our daily life today is not even halfway as open as HTML is and dealing with them is not as easy as you think.
Furthermore, you're free to call Firefox a "document viewer".
I personally prefer a state of the art web browser and a state of the art PDF viewer more than one document viewer that only handles subsets of 2 document types.
Chill Winston, no need to get so aggressive just because you were wrong about the browser not being a document viewer. Because that's exactly what it is. That's all. No attack on you, your preferences or ideology. Just facts.
I'm clearly not as well versed on the minutia of PDFs as you are, but I am an expert on browsers and their capabilities as a document viewer.
Your preferences are your own, and I am not here to refute them or change your mind. You keep trucking however you like.
You seeing me as aggressive just because I'm right about Firefox being a web browser is nothing I can do anything about and something you have to work with.
Me and Mozilla will keep trucking and call Mozilla Firefox a Web Browser.... Or as Wikipedia says:
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
And you keep calling Firefox your banana or whatever. It's ok. I promise to continue to not being aggressive about it.
Banana or not, a document viewer / editor that handle a subset of two standards is not a very versatile document viewer / editor.
So back to my original point: Since Mozilla doesn't have a very stable business model it seems dangerous to focus on other things than making their web browser the best at browsing the web.
Ps. It took us over 20 years to get rid of the cluster f***s Internet Explorer and Flash was and it seems we should have learned the lesson by now. Going down the same route as before, starting to support standards that rely on patents owned by a third party (Adobe in this case) is definitively not a death sentence in any way, but history has shown us that it's a slippery slope that has many different paths and endings.