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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."
Can you turn that off? I haven't used Flash in so many years and do not want a mandatory plugin.
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
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.
I use Pale Moon, but it has the serious problem that just about every website misidentifies it as a severely outdated version of Firefox and throws warnings all over.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.