Google Makes Latest Chrome Build Open PDFs By Default 202
An anonymous reader writes "Google is changing the way its browser handles PDF files, starting with the Chrome Canary channel. Citing security concerns, the company wants Chrome to open PDF files by default, bypassing any third-party programs such as Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader."
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.
The Chrome PDF viewer is shit. So is the Firefox one. They're fine for viewing most basic PDFs, but anything more involved (forms, interactive PDFs, portfolios, etc.) and they both just shit the bed.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just give me a prompt to save/open/cancel any day. I miss the good old days.
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Just give me a prompt to save/open/cancel any day. I miss the good old days.
You can disable individual Chrome pug-ins - including the PDF viewer - in Settings -> Content Settings. I'm sure there are other ways to get to that setting.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
If a new feature is added by way of an update, it should prompt for its settings the first time it becomes relevant. So on the first click on a PDF the browser should prompt: "you can now view PDFs within the browser, enable / disbale this feature / let me try once and prompt me again." It shouldn't silently enable the feature and let the hapless user hunt in the settings for a way to disable it, that's just rude.
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Why not? It works for Facebook.
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yeah that's how it is now but what the fuck is wrong with bringing up the dialog with options if you have multiple pdf capable apps like it is now?
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed, I actually PREFER to have Chrome open a pdf, because its one less virus ridden file I have to deal with.
I'm still given the option of saving it if I want. Chrome itself seems to recognize which PDFs it can't handle, and prompts for download.
(but those are PRECISELY the ones you have to worry about the most. )
I really don't understand why this is news, since Chrome has been doing this for years now.
(At least since 2010 according to TFA).
Maybe they will enhance it enough such that we don't need to run any Adobe software. With Adobe dropping linux support
all together, there are no fully capable alternatives.
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The news is that Chrome only ever opened PDFs by default if Acrobat wasn't installed.
Now they're giving the big middle finger to Adobe saying we think your reader for your format is insecure so we're going to open PDFs regardless of what you do. That is quite a significant change.
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That's simply not true.
I have both Adobe and Foxit installed and MOST PDFs open via Chrome.
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You can claim that all you want. You're an edge case, maybe as a result of playing with some settings at some point. Since version 8 the PDF viewer only worked by default if the Adobe PDF extension was not present on the system. Clicking on a PDF will bring it up at the bottom in the download bar along with a security warning saying the file type may harm your computer. It also greyed out the option to always download that filetype.
Do a search on the Google forums. There's plenty of threads asking how to wo
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How so? It's more insecure in the long term, because now Google have to support not only a web browser but a Pdf viewer. And both have a long history of being insecure. Insecure+Insecure!=more secure. But because it's from Google you think it's going to be magically more secure?
I would rather think that Google will either drop the ball on either the browser part or the PDF part in the long term. And it will not be the PDF part that will get less support from Google. Expect to hear news of security exploits
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now Google have to support not only a web browser but a Pdf viewer
I don't think that's relevant. Each of Google and Adobe have lots of other software that they have to support. The fact that the PDF viewer sits inside the browser doesn't really affect its maintenance.
both have a long history of being insecure
...unlike Adobe Reader?
I would rather think that Google will either drop the ball on either the browser part or the PDF part in the long term.
Why? They're both important and need to be maintained.
Expect to hear news of security exploits in Chrome based on their PDF viewer.
Expect to hear news of security exploits in all popular software. I'm already sick of hearing about exploits in Acrobat.
I think a move towards multiple viewers will help PDF as a standard, and a move away from Adobe's software in par
Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)
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When did you last test it? Most of my files open well enough. I'm on 25.0
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Yup, especially restaurant menus, which are *always* in PDF. It's frustrating when you're on mobile and just want to see the menu before you commit a large party with diverse dietary restrictions to going somewhere.
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No, some restaurant menus are actually in flash which is even worse than pdf... At least the pdf files will view on most mobiles, flash is completely unusable.
Several restaurants have lost my custom because their menus were in flash.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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There is a good reason for their being PDFs. That's to make them readable and printable on almost any machine running almost any system. they could have exported them to html but that wouldn't make them automatically have identical pagination on every system regardless of browsers, screen size and other things that are relevant for documents primarily intended for print.
I agree with the overall 90%, except in my case it's more like 98% of the time I only want the document to read and maybe print. If the
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Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.
No problem with anti-competitive practices, or inferior-by-default programs. Just don't make your system administrator ... administer anything else.
Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?
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Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?
Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.
We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all ou
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?
I myself tend to like PDFs for print materials because it's pretty much the only format that is guaranteed to scale exactly as shown. When I scan documents, or create documents that are primarily going to be used in print form, it's pretty much a given that they'll always be PDF's.
For anything else though they're annoying.
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That's because that's what they were supposed to be for, until Adobe decided to start shitting into bags and hanging them off the side of the standard.
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printing, yes. pdf is zipped printer language (Score:3)
For transporting documents intended for print, or intended to look like standard size printed paper, off does a good job, and there's a reason for that.
For those unfamiliar with the history, Postscript is a popular language for computers to talk to printers. Windows, Mac and other computers could all speak Postscript. "Print preview" functions could also read the postscript commands to display a print-like view on screen. So if you wanted a platform independent document, you could just use those Postscrip
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Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?
Can you even generate Word docs from LaTeX files?
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You jest, but I'm sure I've rolled my face around on my keyboard and produced a Perl script that does that.
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I'm quite serious. Converting a LaTeX file to pdf is typing pdflatex foo.tex. If you use pstricks, do latex foo.tex; dvips foo.dvi -o; ps2pdf foo.ps. The -o option in the dvips command outputs to file rather than prints. The default file name is obtained by replacing the dvi with ps.
I'm sure I've rolled my face around on my keyboard and produced a Perl script
FTFY.
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Yes. It's called tex4ht and does a surprisingly good job of producing something that can be mangled into presentable shape in a finite amount of time.
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Because they do what they are supposed to do well enough, and they have a large corporation backing and supporting the format.
If you don't like PDF, you should propose an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical -- or as close to it as possible, anywhere you see it. It should support rendering formatted and spaced text, images, composite images for scanned documents, vector graphics, forms, digital signing, ... and an
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> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical
You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.
One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards.
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> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical
You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.
One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards. Another is that it is possible to get commercial support for it, and a third is that it supports some useful "fill-in-blanks" formats. But consistent document formatting is not a reason to prefer PDF over LaTeX. Another is its very tight integration with most powerful web browsers, which does tend to make things faster than loading up the separate view application.
You're comparing apples and oranges. PDF and LaTeX are not competitors; they are complementary. LaTeX is just a text processing language. Your .tex file will not display anything correctly. It's a plain text file. The default output for LaTeX is PostScript, which is not really intended for display (it's just printer commands). So you will need a program capable of rendering .ps files to view it. Hence, ghostscript, which is not a competing format to postscript, but rather a suite of tools for working with p
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XPS is based on the xml-in-a-zip-file paradigm, specifically, the Open Packaging Conventions format, as used by docx and xlsx. In most aspects, PDF and XPS have identical features: both use explicit positioning, formatting and spacing of objects in the document; both support compression, encryption, and some sort of "DRM" schemes. They differ in the details, such as the image formats they support: XPS favors TIFF and JPEG XR, over PDF's Jpeg2000 and JBIG.
In my opinion, OpenXPS is a better format for the Web
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No problem with anti-competitive practices, or inferior-by-default programs. Just don't make your system administrator ... administer anything else.
Before you diss it, or decide to be heavyhanded and think you need to override Google's choice, because you have to do one more thing.... talk to your security administrator.
The change creates a minor inconvenience for a small number of uses, and greatly reduces a major security risk.
Now if only MS, Google, and FF would all agree to put out security u
Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways? (Score:2)
We aren't, they are.
(RTFM has become RTFPDF - you don't get a paper manual these days for anything.
Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a feature, not a bug. It's not just a feature, it is THE feature.
I'm very serious. Plenty of times an 'editable' PowerPoint is substantially garbled when it's opened up on a different version, or some Office configuration changed, or it's on somebody else's installation or it's 3 years old, or it needed an equation plugin, or the fonts are whatever...
If I have an important presentation---"save as PDF" is essential. I want to be able to give away (and use) poorly-editable copies which Microsoft programs will NOT do anything to.
That is an essential feature.
| and because we desperately need a format which essentially displays graphics and text to require weekly updates to remove the latest batch of exploits.
PDF isn't the problem. Adobe is that problem. MacOS and other software display PDF fine.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
| Because we love formats which are impossible to convert into any other format; which require complicated, ugly tools to perform even basic formatting,
This is a feature, not a bug. It's not just a feature, it is THE feature
This. I was doing literal rocket science (a project for the ISS) and Solidworks document printing was incessantly moving things around (typically on top of something else, making both notations illegible). I printed always to PDF, fixed the errors in PDF, and then submitted *that* paper to the controlling authority (JAXA, in this case). I couldn't trust Solidworks to print what it said it would. I could trust PDF.
AC
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> I'm very serious. Plenty of times an 'editable' PowerPoint is substantially garbled when it's opened up on a different version, or some Office configuration changed, > or it's on somebody else's installation or it's 3 years old, or it needed an equation plugin, or the fonts are whatever...
Most of the times it's Microsoft's fault, changing format with every release (is it a subtle play at forcing everyone to upgrade?) A well maintained document format (e.g.: ODF) wouldn't have that issue. Today, many
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Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.
Use the chrome GPO templates, thats sort of why theyre there.
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It's 2013 and still not a single documented sighting of any user ever wanting any of those things from a PDF. Thus, it sounds like you're saying Chrome perfectly does everything, that anyone might ever need.
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Thanks, but our users do use those things.
The only thing we want them to use is forms (simple fill in, not submit, email, monitor, etc.).
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If you going into the applications settings in firefox you can change it to use the adobe reader plugin again, but I doubt adobe will continue to support the plugin.
How so very secure! (Score:4, Insightful)
And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.
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And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.
I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not. Save it to disk; and let me worry about what to do with it. Everytime you add more features, more code, you add more vulnerabilities.
Knock it the fuck off, Google. Get your head together: We liked Chrome because it was fast and minimalist. If I wanted a bloated up kitchen sink I'd go with Firefox. Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed t
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I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not.
However ISO 32000-1 is a standard.
Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!
*backs away slowly*
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However ISO 32000-1 is a standard.
Because a bunch of companies paid a fuckton to have it become a standard, yeah. Google up the history on that... a lot of money was handed out to get an ISO working group and get it stamped as a standard. It was bought and paid for by Adobe. So there's that.
There's also the fact that PDFs don't belong in a browser anyway. It's an outgrowth of PCL, a language for printing documents out of the 90s. It's not multimedia, and every attempt to make it web-friendly is a bandaid that opens large numbers of vulnerab
Re:How so very secure! (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in reality, this will stop a large number of infections from occurring.
So very much this. (Score:2)
If this cannot be disabled, I for one will be removing Chrome from my machine, and I say that as somebody who has used it as my primary browser since it first came out. I am getting more and more fed up with the continuou
Re:So very much this. (Score:5, Informative)
That's completely opposite of my experience.
On my not-so-hot computer I regularly open very complex, 400+ page PDFs (music scores mostly). We're talking 30MB w/o any imbedded images, just pure intensive processing instructions.
Chrome, from a total standstill (the process not even running yet), takes just slightly longer then it takes me to blink to start, load the PDF, and render. It's an order of magnitude faster in every way then every other PDF viewer I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.
It lacks features (PDF bookmarks, etc), but render speed is fantastic.
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Music scores don't tend to have the complex, MS Word driven document overformatting that is directly visible if you ever read the PDF.
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There is no comparison at all in my mind: Google's engine is slower than *any* PDF reader I have used in the last five years. And it's slow at the initial download, is the ridiculous thing. Download the exact same thing as a file in Chrome, it does it in a matter of seconds. Wait for it to
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Any chance you can offer a link to any of these particularly intensive PDFs?
I'm not discounting your experience, I just have yet to encounter anything like you're describing.
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My guess is that hardware acceleration is working fine on your computer.
I recall all the hell I had to endure with my AMD video card and broken hardware acceleration, so I turned acceleration off completely. That made a hell of a difference with web browser speed.
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While I feel for your plight, the idea of running without hardware acceleration in 2013 is pretty uncommon. It's certainly nothing any sane person would bother optimizing for. We're optimistically talking about 0.1% of users. You'd effectively be optimizing for actually broken systems. That's like optimizing a car's high speed handling for cases where one tire is flat; The answer isn't to optimize for conditions of only 3 healthy tires...the answer is to change out the flat tire.
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Well, yeah, I had an AMD card. I've since replaced it with an nVidia and now I have no problems.
I'm OK with that... (Score:5, Interesting)
On older laptops - those that reasonably work well only with XP, I not only install Chrome as the best performing browser, but I also advise people to use it to view PDFs. Note that viewing a PDFs is very different than filling it out etc. A viewer needs to be simple and well performing, and in my experience, even on 10+ year old hardware, Chrome shines there. So, for one, I do welcome this change.
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Ugh. Chrome is dog-slow at viewing PDF's. If I had to use it on an older laptop it would be approaching physical pain to suffer with it. I use Sumatra - it is bare-bones and blazing fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF [wikipedia.org]
"third-party programs"? (Score:5, Insightful)
bypassing any third-party programs such as Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader
Technically, Adobe Reader is the first-party program and Chrome is the third-party program for reading PDFs.
Re:"third-party programs"? (Score:5, Informative)
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No, the first party is the user, and the second party is the program the user is running.
Google is not proposing to force Adobe Reader to use Chrome.
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Chrome will be forcing the system default for the filetype .pdf to become Chrome, not the user.
And if you don't know how to make that not happen or change it when it does, as happens to most people...
That is decidedly not what is happening. TFA specifically states that Chrome, when it downloads the PDF, opens it itself, instead of handing it off to the system handler (i.e. the default application for filetype .pdf). In fact, Chrome is adding a menu option to open it with the default application if you want.
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Technically, Adobe Reader is the first-party program and Chrome is the third-party program for reading PDFs.
Any document viewer outside the web browser; whether implemented as an executable program or a plugin module, is 3rd party software.
Chrome has an internal PDF viewer; and then there are 3rd party choices such as Foxit, Sumatra, or Adobe.
Personally I least-prefer Adobe's PDF reader, even though it used to be one of the most popular ones.
party in your pants (Score:5, Funny)
And you're the only one who came.
Sunnary unclear (Score:5, Informative)
Likely this was done to be consistent. Any security the Chrome PDF viewer could offer could be easily bypassed by an attacker forcing the file to download. If the user clicks it, it opens in the system PDF viewer.
I believe Adobe Reader has its own sandbox so this might seem a bit weird... but at least one thing Chrome has going for it that Reader has not is that Chrome is more likely to be up-to-date (I forget how Reader updates itself, if it does at all) AND it pulls the latest Chrome PDF plugin with it.
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I believe Adobe Reader has its own sandbox so this might seem a bit weird... but at least one thing Chrome has going for it that Reader has not is that Chrome is more likely to be up-to-date
Not to mention the fact that the Adobe Reader has a long, rich history of serious security defects. The Chrome viewer has a big security advantage over Adobe Reader: It's not feature complete. Adobe has packed so many arcane capabilities into PDFs that it's a nightmare trying to support everything and keep it secure. The Chrome viewer doesn't do all that stuff that's hardly ever used in practice, so there are many classes of security vulnerabilities the dev team doesn't have to worry about. This means that
When I set a default (Score:5, Insightful)
When I set a default for a file extension in the OS, I expect the browser to respect that setting. Both Firefox and Chrome are now "bad apples" in the desktop configuration arena. Shame on them both. I see no reason why their implementation would be any more secure than the applications I've already chosen.
Re:When I set a default (Score:5, Insightful)
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I see no reason why their implementation would be any more secure than the applications I've already chosen.
Well, if the app you've already chosen is Adobe's, you should look at the history of vulnerabilities on it and Chrome's viewer. You'll see reason.
Chrome should launch IE to view html pages? (Score:3)
If your default browser is IE, every time you click a link to an html page Chrome should launch IE, ignoring the fact that you've explicitly decided to use Chrome at the moment?
No? How about a jpeg, as Dahan said? Should Chrome display the image, or open Photoshop?
What's the difference between opening Adobe's software for jpegs and opening Adobe's software for pdfs?
Security Issues with Foxit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/version_history.php [foxitsoftware.com]
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I've never heard of anyone having any security issues with Foxit.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/security_bulletins.php [foxitsoftware.com]
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I've always liked PDF Exchange viewer. Higher performance than Adobe, more free features (annotations) than Foxit.
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer [tracker-software.com]
Simple as that (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome PDF Viewer --> Disable.
Obligatory Zawinski's Law (Score:3, Insightful)
But Try To Escape (Score:2)
Today I was trying to lose Chrome, and go for another browser. I wasted about an hour and a half trying to sync Firefox between Android and my Mint Linux desktop, [mozillazine.org] then gave up.
I tried Opera, which does install and sync with ease, and looks great, except that it refuses to display Google Calendar at all well. [threesquirrels.com]
What I'm finding is that Google has a lock on a lot of things that I use, that
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Today I was trying to lose Chrome, and go for another browser. I wasted about an hour and a half trying to sync Firefox between Android and my Mint Linux desktop, [mozillazine.org] then gave up.
Then stop wasting your time. Use the XMarks addon. It is able to sync bookmarks among a number of browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. It is also available on Android.
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I like having stuff like contacts and calendar synced between my desktop and smartphone. Google does that really, really well.
I've moved my RSS feeds over to Tiny Tiny RSS, and like that model - I control it.
I want to eliminate Chrome next because (I thought) it would
Not terribly concerned (Score:2)
1. NotScript seems to be blocking all PDFs on my setup. I didn't get it for that; but that seems to be what it does by default. I'll have to look into it. 2. Google's in-browser PDF viewer is able to handle files that Adobe's can't. The Adobe viewer seems to have some kind of memory management issue. It thrashes my disk on files that Chrome handles just fine. When I have a PDF on the desktop, I drag it to the browser now instead of letting the default association kick in. 3. About that default ass
Can I stop it following links? (Score:2)
Not a problem (Score:2)
Ah doan lahk Chrom, ahtohl. Trahd it. Deent lahk it.
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hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs (Score:5, Interesting)
For that matter QNX, a complete graphical OS including essential programs like a web browser and even a web server is a couple MB - smaller than many odd DOCUMENTS.
I wonder how blazingly fast a 4MB OS is on 4GHz machine with GBs of RAM. The CPU could process the entire OS in less than a millisecond.
Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs (Score:5, Funny)
No matter. Adobe will find a way to bring the system to its knees.
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Unless a userland process has a ton of OS level locks on the I/O devices (disk read/writes, managing it's own cache in files, other strange behavior) that all result in OS API calls. If the userland process does all of that, than the OS is going to grind along trying to manage all of the coder's stupidity.
Which probably explains both Adobe and the early JREs, in fact.
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process the entire OS
Im not sure what that combination of words means, and It surely does not follow from "being only 4MB".
I could write a LOT of 4MB programs that take a long time to "process".
meaning it could do _whatever_ to the whole system (Score:2)
The point is, whatever operation you want the hardware to perform, it could do it to the whole system extremely quickly. Some examples:
At boot, it can load the entire system into RAM in under a second and never wait for a read from the flash drive again.
Next, it could download an update which replaces every file in the entire OS in less than 5 seconds.
A virus scan of the OS takes less than a second.
A complete backup takes less than a second.
Opening the web browser takes less than a millisecond (it was duly
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Re:adobe reader. (Score:5, Informative)
how can a document renderer, basically a postscript web browser with ALL THE FUNCTIONS REMOVED, be bigger than an virtual computer in your computer?
Ah.... what you are missing is clear now. You missed the point that a PDF viewer is a virtual computer in your computer.
Among other things.... PDFs can contain scripts and various executable bits. What do you think the major source of security issues in PDF is?
Re:Data usage & Battery life (Score:4, Funny)
I think you may have posted on the wrong thread - Google is not (yet) the government ;)
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Indeed. It's like the OtherOS feature that Sony took away. Good bye Sony. The NSA is behind this. Global warming.
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