What is this idiotic idea to have to stuff everything in a browser ? Firefox edits pdf ?

[William Gaatjes]

Why in God's name does firefox has to become the old internet explorer and now edge and chrome ?

What is wrong keeping a browser nothing more than that ? A browser !
Keeps the code simpler.

Years ago, Opera browser gained a huge amount of momentum after some managers at Microsoft decided that Internet Explorer should be able to do everything !
Like being able to execute programma code like scripting languages. Which made windows a huge target for viruses, worms and other nasty stuff.
The word document worm netsky was famous for that.

And the most famous was the ILOVEYOU email with a scripting language.
According to the internet because i do not know the details anymore it was VBscript.

A huge flaw to let outlook automatically execute scripts by clicking on it. And IE had the same problem.

One nagging thought makes me wonder and irritates me.
Is it that the manager that used to work at Microsoft or the programmer that used to work at Microsoft, who proposed such features at the time...
Have these persons switched to the firefox project after leaving the Chromium project ?

 

[Shmee]

I don't mind more features. And it beats having to have a separate app for everything, like they try to have people do on the phone, which is annoying. I prefer just to use Firefox.

 

[igor_kavinski]

More options are always good. It has to be a requested feature from their users. PDF editing software is big business since you really need to do that a lot if you are working in an office or educational institution so many users, especially those using open source software, may have been fed up by having to download and use a separate piece of software for editing a file that the browser already has the support to open and view. So I just see it as an evolution of Firefox's PDF capabilities. Plus, they need to compete and gain more marketshare away from Chrome and Microsoft Edge. If they don't do that, their userbase may dwindle to the point that they may cease to exist. I hope that never happens but one must be prepared and strive to thwart any existential crisis.

 

[manly]

More options are always good. It has to be a requested feature from their users. PDF editing software is big business since you really need to do that a lot if you are working in an office or educational institution so many users, especially those using open source software, may have been fed up by having to download and use a separate piece of software for editing a file that the browser already has the support to open and view. So I just see it as an evolution of Firefox's PDF capabilities. Plus, they need to compete and gain more marketshare away from Chrome and Microsoft Edge. If they don't do that, their userbase may dwindle to the point that they may cease to exist. I hope that never happens but one must be prepared and strive to thwart any existential crisis.

Mozilla makes lots of profit from the Google search deal, but Firefox has basically joined Opera in irrelevance. I still use it as a secondary browser, but we're outliers.

It's worse than I thought, FF is already well below 5% in total browsing share. They're even below Opera in mobile browsing.

 

[igor_kavinski]

It's worse than I thought, FF is already well below 5% in total browsing share. They're even below Opera in mobile browsing.

Hush! Don't make me panic. I'm not in the mood to go searching for an alternative should Firefox suddenly go down under. Ignorance is bliss!

 

[manly]

Hush! Don't make me panic. I'm not in the mood to go searching for an alternative should Firefox suddenly go down under. Ignorance is bliss!

Relax, since it's open source, you can always compile it yourself after you fix any CVEs you've discovered.

 

[mindless1]

I primarily use Firefox, but set it to open PDFs with Foxit. Is that the best free PDF app now? It's still doing what I need of it but don't edit a lot of PDFs these days besides filling them in for submission to someone.

I do print a lot of PDFs through Firefox (print TO PDF, not to paper) and it looks like CutePDF printer is my default for that, tho' often I find that Firefox does not render pages as well for PDF printing as Chrome does.

 

[Macher]

I don't mind more features. And it beats having to have a separate app for everything, like they try to have people do on the phone, which is annoying. I prefer just to use Firefox.

That reminds me of the emacs people who regard operating systems as convenient hosts for running emacs.

Firefox already takes about as much disk space as Windows 95 did, and it doesn't even come with Minesweeper. Though with Chrome OS, the line between "browser" and "operating system" is becoming iffy.

 

[Ajay]

That reminds me of the emacs people who regard operating systems as convenient hosts for running emacs.

LOL! That was pretty much me many years ago - Xemacs though.

 

[lxskllr]

People seem to like dealing with pdfs in the browser. I'm not one of those people. I used to have pdf turned off in the browser, but I currently use it to open web pdfs. Seems like more often than not, I just find something on the web, read it quick, then never see it again. If I do want to see it again, it gets saved, and I use a dedicated pdf reader for future viewings.

So... I don't care much. It's there for people to use if they want, and it can be turned off if they don't. I use firefox desktop and mobile virtually 100% of the time. Marketshare is of little concern to me. I use a minority o/s. minority programs on my phone, and I'm fine with a minority browser. Other people can be fools. They don't need me to participate.

 

[Steltek]

Unless I am missing something, this is simply advertising hype only. The truth of the matter is that the "PDF editing" being claimed by Mozilla is simply the ability to type text over an existing PDF form. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not really "editing" in any sense of the word, nor is it very impressive.

 

[mindless1]

^ Need not be impressive, nor more than entering text in fields for "most" peoples' needs... just keeps them from having to install separate software.

Those of us here, would never settle for that limited functionality, and yet many do, do exactly that relying on windows features, even drivers, instead of the full featured alternatives.

I don't see it as a bad thing as long as it can be disabled, open in 3rd party app or save to disk instead which are both options. That is unless someone comes along and finds a way to do a security exploit of it. More features tend to cause bug and security hole creep... then the never ending patch/upgrade cycle to fix what they added.

I'm not on the latest version of Firefox and there are times when regret moving from the now ancient v54 which was back when all the better plugins worked. Even Adblock plus crippled itself since then.

 

[mikeymikec]

Firefox already takes about as much disk space as Windows 95 did, and it doesn't even come with Minesweeper. Though with Chrome OS, the line between "browser" and "operating system" is becoming iffy.

I was going to make a point like this: Firefox 1.0's installer is 5MB, Firefox 123's installer is 50MB (comparing win32 installers)

Browsers took a leap forward partly thanks to Microsoft with xmlhttp. If you take away that feature (and any that improved on it), a lot of website features that the web now depends on would disappear and we would still be stuck with a 'submit' button and wait for the page to reload before the website's process could proceed. Another example: These days native video decoding support is expected. Back in the era of Firefox 1.0 the web was relying on Flash and other third-party plug-ins to render the content.

I do wish that Firefox's PDF reading support was improved before they tried to add more to it though. As much as I like Firefox, if a customer is using it and I'm setting up a new computer for them, when the choice comes along to set the default PDF reader, I tend to leave it set to MS Edge because at least that works. Firefox's PDF reader mostly works, but given how essential PDFs are, it needs to be at least as good as Chromium's.

Another point to consider is that - I very much doubt it anyway - these extra features have not resulted in a tonne of vulnerabilities like the early days of Internet Explorer integration caused, so the OP's argument is largely void. As for bloatware arguments, I was working on a customer's Win10 PC earlier today which has been purposefully kept offline for a few years (it's running a 2019 build of Win10). I had to install a new printer on it today and I was worried about how an out-of-date version of Windows/Edge was going to complicate the printer install procedure (no CD with the printer naturally, the content is all downloaded these days). Sure enough, the pre-Chromium version of Edge was problematic but I installed Firefox within about 60 seconds on a HDD-booting Win10 setup that was also processing Windows updates. Relatively speaking, I'd say it is as lean as it ever was. In those days, a new version of Internet Explorer would take at least 10-20 minutes to install.