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Google Builds a Native PDF Reader Into Chrome
An anonymous reader writes "Google's latest Chrome 6 Developer Update comes with a few subtle GUI changes, but there is also a major update under the hood. As its ties with Adobe quite apparently grow stronger, there is not just an integrated Flash player, but also a native PDF reader in the latest version of Chrome 6. Google says the native reader will allow users to interact with PDF files just like they do with regular HTML pages. The reader is included in Chrome versions (Chromium) 6.0.437.1 and higher, and you can use the feature after you have enabled it manually in the plug-ins menu. That is, of course, if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on." The Register has some more details on the PDF plugin and a link to Google's blog post about it.
Does this mean that the PDF pages are translated into HTML pages then displayed? I always thought that one of the main strengths of PDF was that the author has 100% control over how it is presented. Or am I misunderstanding that feature?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
I started using Chrome because it was an improvement over the other browsers. It was faster, it used less memory, and it was more crash-resistant. But I have not been impressed with the latest versions.
Everyone knows about them removing http:// from the URL bar already. Their reasoning was, to put it politely, complete horseshit. That was a change they never should have made.
Embedding Flash natively is good for YouTube, no doubt, but bad for everyone who doesn't want to support or use something that is so shitty and proprietary.
One of the last things I ever wanted was native PDF support in my browser. Just like with Flash, I go out of my way to avoid PDFs.
As much as I dislike proprietary software, these recent Chrome developments are driving me to Opera. Opera is faster than Chrome, manages memory better, and never crashes. While their code isn't open source, at least they embrace open and truly free standards. Until the Chrome developers get their acts together, I'm done with it.
PDF is actually a useful standard when it comes to reproducing printed or printable documents. The worst thing about PDF is Adobe's Reader implementation. Hopefully, this is a clean implementation, not based on Adobe's lousy, slow, insecure Reader code. I know they say its sandboxed, but still.
Anyone using Safari or Firefox (extension here) on the Mac has been able to do this for some time; PDFs are a lot better without the Adobe plugin.
I'm not fully qualified to comment on this since I will never be a Chrome user until someone forks off a "stainless steel" release where a group of people have poured over the source code to ensure there is no Google data collecting going on and then compiles it themselves for distribution.
No, I think what you want is the "tinfoil hat" release.
But seriously, it's called Chromium. It's the fully open source project that feeds into Chrome, and it's free of all Google branding and such. For what it's worth though, there's nothing in Chrome that does anything remotely close to what you're afraid of. Feel free to run it for a couple of weeks through a debugging proxy to watch what it does (I have).
But Chrome is not converting anything. It's more like a plug-in that's native. This is the same way Chrome reads HTML5 natively... it doesn't first convert it to HTML4. It won't look any different than the Adobe's plug-in or FoxIt's plug-in, but you don't have to install it separately. And most awesomely, you won't have to update it separately. Of course this makes Chrome natively a little more vulnerable too... but oodles more secure than Adobe's plug-in.
It's the first pass at it. You expect it to be perfect? This is still the development version. Will you freetards get over yourselves for $DEITY's sake?
The problems with PDF started for the same reasons that DOC problems started. The party responsible for the format decided that hey, wouldn't it be cool if... And after that you got document formats with embedded programming features. No good will ever come of doing such a thing. If you need to do more than just display, then there are ways of handling that. Allowing such things to be embedded in every document without providing a sane way of determining which do and which don't prior to opening causes tons of trouble.
PDFs tend to bloat for at least two reasons - one is the inclusion of tons of rasters and other embedded objects, and that's a problem between chair and keyboard - the resultant documents are just was was asked for. The other is that PDF is (a superset of) a subset of Postscript. Some combinations of software and the drivers that generate PDFs, can do insanely redundant things that cause massive documents. One neat workflow I saw several years ago was placing raster images into Illustrator objects, then through a DTP program to be rendered to PDF. That particular software stack/combination of transformations managed add something like 400x bloat compared to the same document produced in a different way.
Generating non-insane Postscript used to be a solved problem, but it appears to come back every so often.
Also, changes in the PDF happened some time back that had big size advantages. Documents generated by old PDF renderers are going to tend to be larger than those generated by newer ones. (I don't really recall the details, but some of it was how embedded objects are stored.)
I forget what 8 was for.
Adobe's big applications (Photoshop, Premier, etc) are quite good. The problem with Adobe PDF is not a lack of resources, skill or competence on the part of Adobe programmers. The problem is that a PDF reader/creator should be a small simple program, but some pointy haired boss somewhere constantly demands the addition of more and more "features" that are inappropriate, make the program ridiculously bloated and frequently lead to numerous sercurity flaws.
> if you can keep Chrome 6 alive — Windows users have reported frequent crashes, and Google has temporarily suspended the update progress to find out what is going on.
I've experienced Chrome crashes too - more frequently than IE or Firefox. And that's a big problem with Chrome: You can't turn off Automatic updates(*). You will find several hundred meg vanishing from your download quota. I guess the Google developers with their top-of-the-line hardware forget that us regular folks care about things like bandwidth, disk space (it leaves the downloaded files sitting on your hard drive - multiple versions) and quotas (because I don't want to go over my peak quota because some punk program won't take directions). It also jumps up and starts downloading and installing even if you're in the middle of something.
I'd rather schedule my own updates to fit my own schedule - I don't want some program stuffing up when I'm in the middle of something. Chrome has some nice features - it's fast and it doesn't waste the screen space or have the memory bloat that Firefox or IE do, but Chrome crashes a lot and in the end I figured Firefox was best because it at least gives you some control over your PC. Chrome doesn't.
* = Google do provide a way for Enterprise users to modify the groups policy because (as described in their faq) 'enterprises should be able to schedule their own updates'. But Joe Public doesn't get that luxury, and there's no checkbox to turn it up like every other software is decent enough to provide. BTW don't try the REGEDITS; they don't work. Google know about all this because there are many posts complaining about it (search for 'disable chrome automatic updates'), but in the usual corporate arrogance won't even acknowledge the problem: pesky customers! Google think they know what's best.
http://www.google.com/search?q=disable+chrome+automatic+updates
Let me known when they figure out how to add a menu bar. Until then, I'll be sticking with Firefox.
LK
This. I moved from Firefox to Chrome for speed and from Chrome to Ephiphany for a menu bar. I've lost a lot of features in the moves but now I have a fast, stable broswer with a menu bar.
PDF viewing is very fast on OS X, and Safari has natively displayed PDFs for a long time. I blame Adobe's reader.
I know PDF has embedded fonts, but that shouldn't take much room, should it?
Embedded fonts can get pretty big if the software doesn't subset them or a lot of glyphs are used. DeJavu sans for example is over half a megabyte! Some fonts are much bigger (pan-unicode fonts and CJK fonts for example)
What are they doing that converts something that would be a 10K ASCII file into a 500K PDF monstrosity?
PDFs will always be a bit bigger than plain text because they control the positioning of stuff exactly and that takes information. It shouldn't be a factor of 50 though unless images are involved.
Once images are involved the sky's the limit, a single large image can make a pdf huge (and remember images can be inserted at any resoloution so a huge image can display small!)
One of the things about pdfs is always embeds images and usually embeds fonts. This is a mixed blessing, on the one hand it makes the file far more portable than something like html but on the other hand it means you re-download stuff like logos with every pdf you grab.
Can't LaTeX handle it?
LaTeX has it's place but afiact it was never designed to be a distrubution format. A typical LaTeX document involves a load of files that become figures in the document and many use LaTeX add-on packages that may or may not be installed.
About the only thing worse than PDFs are raster scans of documents, and those typically aren't served, they're used as an intermediate step towards porting to a more useful format.
That has not been my experiance with large digitisation projects i've seen the output of (e.g. http://ethos.bl.ac.uk/ ). In my experiance they do OCR for searchability but the accuracy isn't good enough to do a full conversion so they produce pdfs with the image visible but OCR text for copy/paste/search.
It's done because it's a lot easier for computers to search text documents.
Afaict this is the main reason for doing OCR at least in large digitisation projects.
And it saves lots of space.
It does if you throw the originals away. But only an idiot would do that without careful proofreading of the OCRed text and careful proofreading costs a LOT more than storing the original images does.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Geez, it seems like I was just upgraded to 5 last week.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
because TFA doesn't explain that google wrote it themselves. Heck, even the google blog announcement doesn't explain that google wrote it themselves. Guess what, it turns out google did not write it themselves, they're using libpdf.so which is libpdf
How exploitable is/was doc? MS's implementations usually asked you if you wanted to run macros and had macro settings. I can't think of any trojans or botnets that scaled to huge numbers by exploiting doc. Adobe reader? Yes, lots. Adobe's Reader out of the box runs js without even a warning. Its one of the largest exploitable apps on the internet today and most people have its plugin running in their browser.
Unfortunately, scripting in documents isn't going away anytime soon. In the meantime, can't I get some sane defaults?
I hope all the major browsers start implementing their own PDF reader just to balkanize the PDF market. At least this will hurt the Adobe monopoly and hopefully force them to compete on security and not unsecure features.
What do you need the menu bar for that the two menu icons in Chrome can't provide?
Those two icons do not provide a menu bar. It's been a standard part of a GUI for 25 years.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I already have an excellent PDF viewer, thank you very much. It displays my PDFs wonderful and is separated from any browser and don't even use any library that have anything to do with the internet (as far as I know). And I like it that way.
Internet is a highly dangerous place and it's very hard, if not impossible, to secure the browser only for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DOM. But now Google makes the same mistake like MS with the IE (with ActiveX) and includes PDF in the core browser? PDF is a monstrous standard; the hackers can even hack a stand alone PDF viewer to run code on your computer and now you want to include it in the core Chrome? What's next, ActiveX?
Leave it in a additional Addon for that people who just can't just download a PDF and open it in the stand alone PDF viewer.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Try Chromium or ChromePlus.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
using a browser to display documents with complex layouts, fonts, images, etc? What a novel idea, I don't know how nobody thought of this sooner. Seriously, the main reason why I hate PDF is that I need a separate program to open them, when they're just a glorified webpage.
I wonder why they don't just build this as a native client plugin, and use it on-demand when a pdf shows up, instead of making a big deal about how it's "built in".
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Why use a confusing picture (Wrench and Piece of paper?) when perfectly clear text can be used.
Similarly, should I have all my mp3's in one folder, or should I have subfolders by artists and albums, or some other criterion for example?
Anyways, that's why I like the traditional "file edit view history bookmarks tools help" interface. Faster and more organized IMHO
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
How exploitable is/was doc? MS's implementations usually asked you if you wanted to run macros and had macro settings.
I think it only started to do that since Office2K or so; pretty sure that there were popular releases which already had scripting, but no user control over when that starts executing once the document is opened. Most certainly, viruses written in VBA ("macroviruses" was the word for that) costituted a hefty chunk of popular virus registries back in late 90s.
Why use a confusing picture (Wrench and Piece of paper?) when perfectly clear text can be used.
The wrench has been a universal configuration icon as long as we've had icons. In fact, using a wrench to denote the storage of tools predates computers considerably. The truly crafty would drill holes in a crappy wrench, add standoffs, and use it as the handle for a tool drawer. Windows 7 includes a wrench icon for configuration on most notifications. Similarly, a picture of a document has been the symbol for document manipulation as long as we've had icons as well; and further, it has long been present on toolbars.
Or, short form, if you are confused by a wrench and a piece of paper, you are a pathetic tool user. Get off my lawn, if you can manage to walk in a straight line.
Similarly, should I have all my mp3's in one folder, or should I have subfolders by artists and albums, or some other criterion for example?
It's not similar. And BTW, if your filesystem doesn't suck, and your player has decent metadata support, it doesn't matter how you store your mp3s as long as you use a naming convention that supports them all being in the same place.
Anyways, that's why I like the traditional "file edit view history bookmarks tools help" interface. Faster and more organized IMHO
But you're wrong. It's slower and less organized. Menus are piles of functions loosely grouped. Chrome's interface is designed to show you the controls you commonly need. Do you really need to go to the edit menu for copy/cut/paste? Everyone I know knows the keyboard shortcuts, even my artist/chef lady love has managed to get those down, and when she forgets them, she uses the context menu, which is the second place you should go. The menu is a distant third (largely because it is distant) and you don't need to go there except to change encoding or report a bug, two things done very infrequently. I use the wrench menu slightly more often because I like to mess with extensions, but everything commonly used in there has a keyboard shortcut or an interface button... except the bookmarks button, for which you need an extension.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"