Mozilla, the corporation behind Firefox, is developing a built-in PDF renderer based on HTML5 and JavaScript for the most popular alternative browser to Internet Explorer. When it becomes available, Firefox users will no longer rely on Adobe’s proprietary Reader plug-in to open PDF files right within the browser.
Estimated time for the new feature to arrive in stable Firefox builds is within three months, according to Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal.
By then, Firefox will be the second major browser to use an integrated PDF viewer; Google Chrome already had the feature beginning version 8 that was released last year.
Gal, however, noted Chrome’s dependency on an application programming interface or API to make a built-in PDF viewer as less secure than Firefox’s exclusive use of JavaScript and HTML5.
Taken from Gal’s personal blog,
The traditional approach to rendering PDFs in a browser is to use a native-code plugin, either Adobe’s own PDF Reader or other commercial renderers, or some open source alternative (e.g. poppler). From a security perspective, this enlarges the trusted code base, and because of that Google’s Chrome browser goes through quite some pain to sandbox the PDF renderer to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5-based implementation is completely immune to this class of problems.
Initial plans for the first release of the PDF viewer will be as a Firefox extension, although Gal noted the eventual integration of the feature into the browser.
Via PCWorld.
