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Chromification Continues: Firefox May Use Chrome's PDF and Flash Plugins (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today Project Mortar, an initiative to explore the possibility of deploying alternative technologies in Firefox to replace its internal implementations. The project's first two goals are to test two Chrome plugins within the Firefox codebase. These are PDFium, the Chrome plugin for viewing PDF files, and Pepper Flash, Google's custom implementation of Adobe Flash. The decision comes as Mozilla is trying to cut down development costs, after Firefox took a nose dive in market share this year. "In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part of our strategy to remove generic plugin support, we are launching Project Mortar," said Johnny Stenback, Senior Director Of Engineering at Mozilla Corporation. "Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform," Stenback adds. "We will be looking for opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors."
Why don't I just use Chrome?
Can you turn that off? I haven't used Flash in so many years and do not want a mandatory plugin.
When I all but called this when FF moved on from 3.6 people here thought I overreacted. Welcome to FireChrome.
I strongly suggest moving on to Pale Moon. NoScript works with it, so what are you waiting for?
I was a die hard Mozilla fan until they began releasing faster than the plugin community could update their plugins.
I got sick of that song and dance on 3 computers I had been keeping passwords and bookmarks in sync and switched to Chrome years ago.
Been watching the HMS Mozilla flounder in the bay ever since. Time to grab a new bucket of popcorn.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Hey Mozilla!
Just fork Chromium already
If all browsers end up being front ends on top of Chrome it will make Web Page development and testing slightly easier. However, it will also make hijacking any found vulnerability more profitable.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Everyone wants fancy tools that take, at minimum, 10+ Developer Years (If using paid developers.. its a several million dollar budget) to create, but nobody wants to pay for them. Yeah, then you get complete garbage like ad-infested hellholes, or SaaS, or keylogging malware like Chrome.
Do. Not. Even. Think. About. It.
"There are a lot of egg savings to be had by using just one basket."
I am also reminded of the Pontiac Vibe, which was basically a Toyota Matrix, but - naturally - far uglier. What doe Firefox want to be when in grows up? Indistinguishable from Chrome.
Can you say more about this Mozilla and Microsoft partnership? Thanks.
Have a read
The PDF plugin is the worst part of Chrome, on every new install I have to remember what I did before to disable it before. I look at a lot of datasheets, and the built-in-viewer really sucks for doing anything but scanning to see if you want to search through your downloads directory to open it up in a read PDF viewer.
Sorry, I see nothing about a Mozilla and Microsoft partnership there. Care to be more explicit?
Firefox's native PDF viewer works just fine.
Flash is dead. Use HTML5 video. Flash is being blocked in some workplaces because it is pretty much just used for porn.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously, who cares? Nobody uses Firefox because it has the best performance. They use it because Mozilla cares more about users' privacy and rights than Microsoft, Apple, and Google do, and also the superior extensions and built-in privacy/security features.
If Mozilla wants to nab some of the things that are better in Chromium right now like the PDF viewer, all power to them. Less work for the Firefox devs, and surely Google couldn't care less.
So I guess Mozilla is going to think about dissolving in the next few years?
I mean, if they are going to stop developing their own technologies and Firefox is to become just a special skinned version of Chrome, there's no need for all those developers -- of some well-paid (but productively useless) board of directors.
After getting rid of Flash from my Linux install, I don't want a browser to have it built in. Why can't Firefox just fix all the problems and user UI screw-ups they've done in recent years?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I'm guessing it's Mozilla replacing FF's default search with Yahoo. Yahoo uses Bing's search results.
Maybe he thinks that because Yahoo license Microsoft's Bing search engine instead of making their own that this is some sort of remote connection? I have no idea either.
Maybe Firefox should just go away completely
Nobody remembers or cares who Brendan Eich is. He didn't do much for Mozilla. The problem is more the self-entitled professional victims screaming, "Waaah! SJWs! SJWs!" and sobbing that someone should pity them.
Have a read?
You're assuming Asa Dotzler CAN read. Shaky ground there.
I was a loyal Opera user for years and years...until Opera discontinued their PC version and called their new re-skin of Chrome as "Opera". I tried it, it didn't last long...it didn't even have bookmarks. So, I started using FF as my default browser. It wasn't half bad once I got a dozen or two plugins installed. Of course, there was always the problem with plugins breaking when FF upgraded, which really sucked. I *depend* on those plugins, they're what make FF usable. One day, a plugin I absolutely had to use for work broke. So, byebye Firefox.
I use the Opera successor called "Vivaldi" now. It's another Chrome clone. It's missing a lot from the old Opera. But, whatever, at least I don't have to deal with Firefox any more. I wanted to like it, it was my last choice...but I wasn't given any choice. That's really what made me abandon Firefox.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Firefox to integrate C.R.A.P. into the next version.
I certainly hope it is removable. I haven't had Flash on my computer for the better part of a decade. (and the only reason I have it now is because it comes baked into Windows 10. Which I *really* dislike.)
What I'd really like to know is why they are wasting time on either of these projects? Both flash and pdf support is easy to get through a whole variety of mechanisms. Wasting time on supporting a platform that a) many of us would like to see go quickly, quietly, and firmly into the night, and b) isn't terribly useful, either.
Z
chrome://plugins/
Just turn it off. I turned Native Client off as well.
There seems to be a lot of confusion and in traditional Mozilla fashion all this is poorly communicated.
First, Flash no longer gets updated for NPAPI (Netscape API) which is the way it talks to Firefox. Only PPAPI (Pepper API) gets updates, which is what Chrome uses.
Mortar adds support PPAPI and deprecates/removes NPAPI.
It does not mean you need flash or that it adds stuff you "don't want". It just means it still works for the people who need it - that's it.
By that means it also means any other PPAPI plugin works, so the PDF reader too. It doesn't mean PDF.js (Firefox' own reader) goes away. It just means you can also use PPAPI stuff. If Chrome's PDF reader ends up being better than PDF.js over time, then they can switch over to it as default.
It's not using Chrome's rendering, layering, etc. engine. It's not using Chrome's UI. It's not browsing the web with Chrome, at all.
Agreed. Flash is nothing but a security hole that has been long replaced by better functions. I can watch Prime, Netflix, Youtube, and most other videos without it. Plus I have a PDF program on my computer. Why would I want it to show up in a browser window in the first place? I never understood that.
Few of us are privy to the insider details, but all I can say is that shortly after Eich left is when I also dropped Firefox. From just an outsider looking in it seems that the focus of Firefox became something other than technological, to its detriment.
Yeah...still doesn't explain it, sorry. Unless you're claiming that patnering with Yahoo! constitutes partnering with Microsoft because Yahoo uses search results from Bing, in which case...yeah, you're probably bumming the furry who wrote Pale Moon, congratulations.
As a person that has used Flash several times for drawing websites (pretty much the only reason), the difference between actual Flash and Googles shitheap Pepper flash is beyond hilarious.
Pepper flash is INSANELY laggier compared to regular Flash.
Any complex SVG geometry increases the lag considerably.
It sucks for tracking the mouse. It can be noticeably behind the actual mouse position, almost like there was a program using 90% CPU and you noticed the mouse pointer was jumping every so often. That sort of lag.
Pepper Flash is also basically impossible to use on a slightly older machine because the lag is ridiculous.
I no longer use Chrome because Google ripped out the far superior NPAPI system in favour of shitty PepperAPI.
NOPE. I will do the same to any other browser that does that. Fuck Pepper SO MUCH.
Fine, but please don't replace your rendering engine. We need to have an independent page rendering engine that competes with WebKit.
Kriston
I think that for the next version Mozilla should create a default skin for Firefox to make it ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL to Chrome. The main window, the menus, the options, EVERYTHING the exact same. They should also remove every option that can be changed in Firefox which cannot be set in Chrome (disabling the about:config would go a long way towards that goal). Finally, they should finally deprecate their old plugins APIs, which is something they were planning to do anyways. This way, for Firefox 51, they can they silently uninstall Firefox and install Chrome, and hardly anyone will notice.
There is one small advantage to having a PDF viewer in the browser, but it's a [beneficial] side effect for a missing browser feature.
If you do a google search for something and on the results page is a link to a PDF, the link _isn't_ a direct link to the final PDF file. It's a "result" link that actually points to google (e.g. google?url?sa=t&foo=bar). It redirects when you actually click on it. So, if you right click and select "copy link location", you'll get the link pointing to google and not the final site URL.
For ordinary site links, you just click on the search page link and when you land you have the final link in the page URL, which you can bookmark, copy, etc.
For PDFs, if your action is to run Adobe Reader, it will download the PDF but it loses the sense of the final link. With the embedded viewer, the final link is available in the viewer window's URL, just like an ordinary web page.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Many things have hurt Mozilla, from their poor choice to develop a mobile OS rather then focus on a mobile browser, to the petty infighting between certain people within Mozilla. Mozilla has all this warm fuzzy crap about diversity but then forces it's CEO to resign because he donated to a organization which was a private donation not related to Mozilla business. I think people have a right to do whatever on their own time. This was certainly one of the negative turning points of many for Mozilla. Too many wrong turns, and not enough focus on making a individual product. When you start copying your competition you've already concluded they have the best product. There is no innovation but rather your just evolving into the same thing.
Well, they they partnered with Google before and I think they still do. That's where the money is coming from, mostly.
The Microsoft partnership is just Mozilla stirring competition. In the end the only thing that changes is the default search engine and you can switch it back to the one you prefer.
Firefox had a nice bug that allowed an attacker to use pdf.js to upload any readable file from the local OS. After that I decided that having a pdf viewer in a browser was a risk.
So Firefox is making it possible to use Flash and PDFs with alternative implementations, big freakin' whoop. Everyone around here despised pdf.js and the NPAPI, and had nothing positive to say about Shumway while Mozilla were trying that... it's a little late to start acting like you care now. Plus PDFs and Flash are so tangential to the web these days that it hardly matters. Let NPAPI die, and just use the PPAPI version for a little while longer until Flash is completely toast. Likewise it makes no real difference if they use PDF.js or a Wasm version of PDFium. They're tech barely related to the web anyway, and if they get bundled as system addons, we can just remove them if we're so inclined.
What's really amusing is how hard this article is trying to dictate that this is all because Mozilla is losing market share or some such horseshit. Any fool would want to find an alternative, given how rotten the reputations of the current implementations are (deserved or not) and how tangential to the browser the features are anyway. Mozilla already has enough work trying to fix up the fallout from all the horseshit that Google and Apple have been foisting onto the web over the past decade. It hardly matters if they sunset Flash via PPAPI or NPAPI, and it makes no difference which OSS PDF software they bundle with Firefox.
You complain about SJW justice warriors (justice warriors against SJW). So you're a SJWJWJW. I think people like you are the problem! I don't care if that makes me a SJWJWJWJW, but fuck the SJWJWJW.
Project Mordor?
Wait, perhaps I did not mis read after all. What could possibly go wrong with a mono culture?
The only reason to stay on Firefox is that it's addons are better. Whatever your need, there's an addon for that.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
Same here, but I use SeaMonkey.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Mozilla says that these changes are to help reduce the time it spends on non-core technologies. If you want to free up developer time how about stop working on all of the crap you've been adding in like Pocket and Hello that nobody has been asking for.
Not that it matters to me anymore. I moved over to Safari one or two versions ago. While I preferred, or at least was used to, Firefox, I was finding that too many sites that I regularly visited were having problems rendering even when I turned off the ad blockers. I had found myself copying the URL and opening Safari just to look at a page more and more often such that I just decided to move over.
...because opening in browser (and saving to a temp directory, automatically cleared after I close the browser) is better than having the PDF saved to my downloads folder and then launch an entirely separate program before I can even see if the file is worth keeping. I have colleagues who pull PDFs of journal articles, glance, and then decide they didn't need it after all ... and end up with hard drives that are full because of the hundreds of gigabytes of PDFs in the downloads folder.
A simple PDF viewer like PDF.js is fast and does not enable a lot of the "enhanced" settings Adobe PDF products do, like internal scripting, which cuts down my vulnerability footprint too.