- Posts tagged Firefox
- Explore Firefox on posterous
Firefox to Crowd Adobe From the Other Side With HTML5 PDF Renderer
As HTML5 continues to make inroads into proprietary technology bases like Adobe Flash, along comes Firefox and announces it has a low-profile HTML5 project under way to render the PDF format files that normally require Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. I'm not sure that's as big a deal as Computerworld made it sound, particularly given the fact that they didn't even acknowledge that Safari has had this capability for a long time. Instead, they gave Chrome credit for the feature which is built into Apple's WebKit, on which Chrome relies. We Mac guys can't get no respect!
But the Firefox project is important from the perspective that it doesn't use an API into the PDF document format to render the content but rather relies exclusively on HTML5 and JavaScript to do the job. At the very least, this is a great proof-of-concept project. Ultimately, it could dent Adobe's Acrobat franchise a bit but it will probably be several years before it can displace the free reader that has become so ubiquitous people don't even think twice before downloading it when asked.
