Google hugs Adobe harder with Chrome-PDF merge

After announcing plans to integrate Adobe Flash with its Chrome browser, Google is now integrating a PDF reader as well. On Friday, Mountain View rolled out Chrome developer builds for Windows and Mac that include a PDF viewer based on NPAPI Pepper, the revamped plug-in model Google originally developed for use with its Native …

[Anonymous Coward]

plugins schmuggins

To have a decent chance of grabbing market share from windows and/or mac users google are going to have to be able to support common (if awful) formats like flash and pdf's. once the majority have moved to ipads/chromiumOS/whatever it'll be safe to slowly ween the masses on to more sensible and properly open formats rather than the proprietary security nightmares that people currently think they have to use.

there's a bigger plan at work here I reckon.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Adobe Reader?

Safari does PDFs in browser - like this Google thingy is wanting to do. Does that mean Apple give Adobe hugs as well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything but Adobe

PDF is an example of why Steve jobs is right about Adobe. The startup time for the same document in xpdf/kpdf or any other PDF reader is 10s times less then for Adobe if not even around a 100.

The time it takes for the bloody thing to start is enough to boot an OS under vmware on the same machine. It is even slower than openoffice startup.

No thanks, the further away Adobe stays from what is supposed to be a light/thin client codebase - the better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh?

And what's wrong with this? (apart from the possibility on spying on downloaders

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn - a.k.a. "Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google) " which uses google docs to render the pdf, making the vast majority (if not all) PDF-based exploit unusable, or at least targetting google and not you.

[Joel Fiser]

I'm going to call your mothers

I'm so sick of you sheep who can't mention the word Flash with qualifying it with a derogative like (if awful), etc. Why is it awful? Because Steve Jobs said it was?

C'mon, you can think for yourself.. it takes just a little more effort - but you can do it.

Flash fills an important need and always has. That's why it has been the single most ubiquitous piece of software in the World for many years. More than Windows. More than Javascript. More than anything.

And Flash will continue to thrive because browsers will NEVER implement standards completely. There will always be business reasons not to. Of course there are bad examples of Flash - just as there are bad examples of javascript, 'C', LISP, and every other Programming language.

The next time I hear one you twerps out there bashing Flash when all you know is HTML and a little javascript, I'm going to call your mothers and tell her to take away your internet privileges.

[Nathan 6]

Native Client UI Toolkit?

How long before someone creates a full UI toolkit (QT based?) for native client. Now you can truly have native look and feel, not to mention performance from a web distributed app. Java Webstart comes pretty damn close to that already, but that's old tech, we only like new and shiny stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Check Juce from RawMaterialSoftware

The Juce GUI toolkit supports building NPAPI-based Plugins. Apparently, it has not yet been tested with Chrome, but maybe you give it a try. Also, it is not yet officially supported on Linux.

I am sure we will soon see more proper GUI toolkits (including the free ones) ported to NPAPI.

Chrome rocks and I will drink champagne when it kills IE in terms of marketshare. I am sure this will happen sometime in the next few years. Google should buy a game developer and make that available as one of their cloud services. Mabye mixed somehow with youtube and financed by ads.

[Dan 55]

What's this sudden fashion for building everything in?

All the main web browsers have suddenly had video players bolted onto them when using the system's codecs would have been just fine. Chrome's suddenly had Flash and Acrobat built in to it. If someone ever writes an Emacs extension for Firefox then mankind will never get to Mars as we won't be able to leave the Earth's event horizon.

[Tom 38]

Hi Joel!

How do I hate Flash? Let me count the ways!

1) It leaks memory. All the time. Memory I can't get back without restarting my browser

2) It's designed for content creator dickheads only. When those delightful animated/video/audio adverts start up, where is the stop button? Where is the mute button? Where is the dont fucking auto play these shite adverts button.

3) It crashes. Lots.

4) It's super slow, and succeeds in making browsing the web super slow. Every page with one of these shite flash widgets on (think BBC news, 2-3 audio clips embedded in each page) makes the page visibly slower to load, as the browser does arcane jiggerypokery to try to load this bug ridden piece of shit in a safe enough manner to allow me to hear the dark lord Mandelson speak for 1 minute.

5) It's poorly written code (see 1,3,4) that is installed across almost every PC machine in existence. This makes it a large attack vector, just like Acrobat Reader (Adobe secretly owned by RBN?)

I could go on, but I won't.

[Jim Peters 1]

I'll tell you why ...

They want to get everything built-in because they're trying to turn

the browser into the OS. So on their browser-OS (which even has

separate processes now) they can now run a PDF reader and a Flash

reader. They need these things running *in* their browser-OS, not

outside of it. They want everything layered on top of their browser

and completely under its control. Then they have the reliability they

need to make a browser that will never need to be killed from the host

OS, i.e. you no longer need host OS access.

Makes sense?

[Anonymous Coward]

So ?

Competition is good. MS has stagnated for a long time. Their data storage concept is still centered around CP/M "files" in a hierarchical namespace.

Google is kicking their backside by content-addressing data, just for starters.

Also, the whole MS idea of how to operate computers is really backwards. I recently tried to print in the WLAN of my girlfriend. Took me more than an hour to try different driver mumbo-jumbo downloads/installs from HP.

Technically, my PC could have asked the printer for ID and just silently downloaded and installed the drivers from HP (or ask me for permission and then do it without furher clickety-click).

[GazElm]

In the words of Rev. Ian Paisley

No, no, no, NO!

PDF plugins that run directly in the browser are the devil's spawn.

If I want to download and read a PDF, I want to do it in a proper PDF reader, not some bastardised helfbreed that takes over my browser, stops it responding for minutes while it loads all its chuff, and doesn't have half the functions of a standalone PDF reader.

First plugin I install in Firefox (after AdBlock), is the PDFDownload one that stops the Adobe's bloody acrobat reader taking over my page.