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."

Comments

So what

[LichtSpektren]

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.