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Chromification Continues: Firefox May Use Chrome's PDF and Flash Plugins (softpedia.com)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

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."

23 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why don't I just use Chrome?

    1. Re:So... by bjdevil66 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While I'm not as happy with Firefox as I once was, there is one reason I stay with it that will never go away (and Chrome users just accept as a fact of life, which I'm not ready to do) - Google's tracking/privacy views. There is still a shred of privacy left from Google's prying eyes with using Firefox.

      If Firefox ever starts willfully tracking and profiling me personally (and collecting/selling my usage data), I'm out.

    2. Re: So... by rudy_wayne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I still use Firefox simply for its hackability.

      I used to use Firefox for it's customizability. Then along the Assholio release that wiped out many of the things that made Firefox attractive in the first place. So I switched to the Palemoon fork.

    3. Re: So... by Jumperalex · · Score: 2

      Double check your help|troubleshooting page to see if acceleration / directX is disabled. I had the same problem, found that an old buggy driver had caused FF to disable all acceleration (despite the setting being checked) because of crashes. Now google maps is much faster and smoother. Probably not up to chrome standards but it was a non-usable to usable transition.

      --
      If you can't be good, be good at it!
    4. Re: So... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thus the issue is that the website expects acceleration to work properly. The website can be blamed for being slow, and for doing this to promote Chrome.
      It's a lot easier to get enough basic OpenGL in non-browser apps running : Google Earth invariably runs a lot faster than Google Maps, and can be used on old hardware, even in Linux and even with an open source driver.

      I tried KDE "Marble" but I wasn't impressed (blocky, slow, hard to navigate at all, looks like it was made in the mid 90s)
      I've tried gnome-maps right now : it works but there are no UI preferences (what do you expect). The zoom is too fast and coarse, with a transition effect that hurts the eyes. You hit "mousewheelup" and it looks like you're going to crash into the ground at 300 mph. You hit mousewheeldown and it flashes a blank tile that fades in to the maps. Perhaps someone can fork it and turn it into a normal app?

      I don't want browser acceleration. How can I be guaranteed it won't make the browser crash, or actually slow down perhaps to a stand still because of overhead?, if not crash the whole X session.
      There's Google Earth as a 10x faster version of Google Maps, or openstreetmaps website, or others.
      Amazon will also slow down your browser, that's because the web site is defective. So don't go to Amazon (there's ebay for the odd things anyway) or keep only one tab or don't forget you can use a secondary Firefox instance on a secondary profile, where you can either use slow things there or use things you don't want be slowed down.

  2. Flash? turn it off? by ArtemaOne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can you turn that off? I haven't used Flash in so many years and do not want a mandatory plugin.

  3. Miss FF 3.6 already? by sinij · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Miss FF 3.6 already? by Mal-2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Miss FF 3.6 already? by mrchaotica · · Score: 2

      Because the proliferation of pages is not due to repetitive viewing of the same sites, it's due to a tree traversal over the pages linked from a starting page. Sooner or later, I plan to be finished reading them all and close the vast majority of the tabs without any intention of reopening them later.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    3. Re:Miss FF 3.6 already? by aix+tom · · Score: 2

      I have run version 0.14.2014051101 from the "old Versions" Directory of the Add-on (Before the "Drop support for Firefox 30 and older versions" of the Add-on )

      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

  4. Hey Mozilla! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey Mozilla!

    Just fork Chromium already

  5. Chromification by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Chromification by ausekilis · · Score: 2

      ... And really no different than iOS, which forces all browsers to be cheap skins on top of Safari. So much for diversity.

  6. Meaning by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 2

    "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.

  7. PDF Plugin? by Matt_Bennett · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:So what by ArtemaOne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As long as we can turn it off. I don't want a PDF to ever load in a browser. I have a program for that already.

  9. Re:Miss me yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:So what by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2

    Yes. An external viewer.
    Less bloat. PDF.js is annoyingly slow over native options.
    But make these plugins opt-in. People are sick of more dreck to turn off.

  11. Misunderstood by kangsterizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Misunderstood by Barefoot+Monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

      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)

  12. Fine, but please don't replace your renderer by kriston · · Score: 2

    Fine, but please don't replace your rendering engine. We need to have an independent page rendering engine that competes with WebKit.

    --

    Kriston

  13. Flashblock addin by cshay · · Score: 2

    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-...

  14. Re:So long and thanks for all the broken plugins. by cshay · · Score: 2

    People use Firefox for primarily one reason - the plugins. The disrespect and arrogance that Mozilla shows by breaking plugins constantly is stunning.