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Google Quashes 13 Chrome Bugs, Adds PDF Viewer
CWmike writes "Google on Thursday patched 13 vulnerabilities in Chrome 8 (stable), and debuted Google's built-in PDF viewer, an alternative to the bug-plagued Adobe Reader plug-in, and included support for the still-not-launched Chrome Web Store. The 13 flaws fixed in Chrome 8.0.552.215 are in a variety of components, including the browser's history, its video indexing and the display of SVG (scalable vector graphics) animations. Next up: Adobe and Google have collaborated to put the Flash Player plug-in inside a sandbox within the dev build of Chrome, an effort by the two companies to better protect users from attacks."
Just tested it with chrome 9.x... the pdf rendering is ridiculously fast.
"The viewer renders PDF documents as HTML-based pages"
I hope it does a better job than the PDF viewer built into Google search...
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Adobe makes money with PDF authoring tools, not with reader. Since PDF is marketed as a universal format, I guess it is in Adobe's best interest for end users to have a seamless experience accessing PDF content in every possible platform.
All this enhancement sounds great, but I wish they would concentrate on compatibility with web sites first. There are too many sites that don't work well with Chrome and I am tired of getting warnings from popular sites that warn me about running an unsupported browser.
Any examples you can come up with, because I have no idea what you're talking about. WebKit is extremely compatible (it's one of the most popular HTML engines out there), and I don't know of any incompatibilities with Chrome's Javascript VM either, so... I guess I'll just have to call BS.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Any website that warns about unsupported browsers is by definition designed by someone who doesn't know how to design websites. Properly designed websites follow standards, and web browsers comply with those standards. When a web developer speaks in terms of which browsers they do and don't support that is a direct indication that they don't understand even the most basic and fundamental concepts of website design.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
about:plugins -> Chrome PDF Viewer -> Disable.
or
Options -> Under the Hood -> Content settings -> Plug-ins -> Block all.
Also it's weird to say a plugin is causing bloat, when the plugin resides in a shared library, it only registers one embed handler, and is entered only when a PDF is viewed. It has zero runtime overhead and its .text section is shared between processes (iirc... loadlibrary on win32 does copy-on-write).
...and here's why:
The fact that after all these releases, Google still does not see it prudent to had 'print preview' added to Chrome as one of its features.
Folks, this feature is a killer for me...and I am not alone. Trust me on this.
I'm not a fan of PDF at all - but if you want to use a browser for work, decent PDF handling is a necessary evil. The old "solution" - pulling the PDF into Google Apps - couldn't handle PDF files accessed through https. That made it a non-starter in my work environment.
All you young'uns are free to bitch and moan about PDF itself; but in the real world you usually have to be pragmatic.
#DeleteChrome
Hello monoculture software. Hello exploits.
We embedded a viewer so that we could sandbox it. This makes exploits much harder to pull off. If you do manage to get a user to open a PDF that exploits a bug, the sandbox ensures that the process you now control is unable to access the filesystem or open network connections, and will be killed if it tries.
99% of users don't know what a plugin is, and won't keep them up to date unless the process is totally automatic. Chrome got this right: Updates are silently downloaded and applied unless you go out of your way to disabling them. Making the PDF plugin a part of Chrome allows chrome updates to update the plugin. Chrome's track record fixing security bugs fast is far better than the record of the PDF plugin that virtually all Windows users most user have.
If you don't want to use the fast, small, sandboxed PDF viewer that gets security updates, go to about:plugins and click disable. Nothing stops you from using other plugin if you want to.
If I were to guess, it would be due to the two buffers X windows uses
How does that explain the fact that I had to manually type in the above quote, and I'm running Windows 7?
It's fucking ridiculous, it happens with no other site but this one, and the fact that Slashdot has done nothing to fix it in the past MONTH that it's been going on, is absolutely incomprehensible to me. What. The. Fuck. Find the problem and fix it.
Even if it's somehow a bug in Chrome, I laugh out loud at the prospect of switching away from my preferred browser because one site on the Internet can't be assed to worked around the problem. I'd rather abandon Slashdot than abandon Chrome, and that's saying something.
The reason is that the PDF support is actually Foxit reader being distributed as a plugin.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.