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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."
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
I use Pale Moon, but it has the serious problem that just about every website misidentifies it as a severely outdated version of Firefox and throws warnings all over. Twitter video doesn't work ("This browser does not support video playback"). For a while, 8chan was using code incompatible with Pale Moon and refused to change it because "the lead dev is a furfag." Every time I hit a broken site, I have to check it with something else because half the time, it's incompatibility with Pale Moon.
That said, it has some huge advantages, such as not mutating the user interface every other day, and not breaking plugin compatibility with updates.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Agreed. I read the article and it's... basically just trying to stir up panic over nothing.
NPAPI had a good run. It was made in 1995 and was used by Chrome, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Firefox, Opera and many other browsers (obviously not in that order). But it's been showing its age for a long time, and most browsers have dropped support for it years ago - Firefox keeps it alive purely because of Flash. But Flash is also implemented for the Pepper API, so if they can get enough of Pepper implemented to run Flash through that then they can finally ditch NPAPI. The alternative would be to invest a fortune inventing a whole new Mozilla-specific architecture just for Flash on Firefox and hope that Adobe still cares enough about both Flash and Firefox to reimplement the plugin for them - not likely.
Getting PDFium to work was the proof-of-concept for a minimal Pepper implementation on Firefox. Just enough Pepper API to run Flash is the end goal for now. Maybe they'll eventually decide to do a full Pepper implementation, but I don't think that's a concern for now.
This doesn't mean they plan to replace PDF.js with PDFium (which doesn't mean that they won't do so; I hope they don't, because PDF.js has been working very well for me and doesn't require any plugins)