Windows 7: Mozilla wants Firefox to render PDFs with HTML5, JavaScript

Currently, browsers rely on plug-ins to display PDF files, like Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader. This may soon change, as there is a Firefox project in the works to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

A PDF reader needs to be fast at operations like rendering text, drawing lines, blitting images – all the things that browsers need to be fast at too. In other words, browser are already optimized for the task at hand, they just need to be told how to do it.

The project is called pdf.js and is available for everyone to see on GitHub. It has been in development for about a month now, but there's already an early demo available at people.mozilla.org/~gal/test.html that you can check out for yourself. There are still glitches and rendering artifacts, but it's definitely a good start, especially for four weeks of work.

The first order of business is to get pdf.js to render PDFs "natively" in Firefox itself, and the team believes it can get the most commonly used PDF features working in less than three months. The group will start by making a Firefox extension available to interested users that enables inline PDF rendering using pdf.js.

When Win 8 comes around, it'll have it's own built in pdf software....

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

Will it? I can just see Adobe having a fit unless its just a bundle of Adobe Reader...?

If it uses Adobe I will pass unless it can be disabled.

Jim

Interesting. I'll be keeping an eye open on this. Whether we will also need to install either Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader (or some other equivalent program) to view files already saved on the HDD remains to be seen, as it will depend on the scope of this proposed new add-on. In other words, will it decode locally stored files as well as those that are on-line?

Chrome already has its own PDF reader built in. Works well and is much faster.