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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."

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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
  3. 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.