10 thoughts on - Speaking Of Firefox…

• I just tested a dozen or so PDFs from the internet and did print preview
  … all looked OK (on CentOS-6). Is it just this one PDF or others too.

• Johnny Hughes wrote:

  Phys Rev E, vol 77, article 030902. Do a print preview, which takes a long time, then look at the scales to the graphs on pages two and three.

  mark

• The Firefox PDF engine is new, and PDF is complex. Hence, Firefox PDF
  still has problems.

  This is almost certainly not the right list to get this fixed. This belongs in Mozilla’s bug database.

  If it used to work right in a past version, you need to be able to show that. If it works on other platforms, or in later versions not yet available on CentOS, you need to show that instead. If it doesn’t work right in any current version of Firefox, then what you probably need to file is a request for enhancement, rather than a bug report, since Firefox probably isn’t implementing every last legal behavior defined in the PDF spec.

  Unfortunately, you’re going to have a tough time getting any developer attention on this, since PRE articles are behind a paywall. That leaves you without a ready testcase.

  You support computers. How does it work when someone comes up to you in your professional capacity and says “when I do X, it does Y”, but then refuses to let you watch while they do X?

• APS

• Warren Young wrote:
  our IPs in that ok’d. I can check when I get home if there’s something else… for right now, that was the one that showed the problem.

  mark

• Firefox’ built-in PDF viewer blows the hell out of my laptop’s fan. I
  turned it off, Evince is so SO much better.

• PRX is open-access: http://prx.aps.org/

  Perhaps you can come up with a cite in that or another open-access journal, like arXiv?

• m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

  Don’t print from firefox (i.e. don’t use CTRL-P or print from the menu) use the print icon on the PDF viewer bar (i.e. the one with Page N of M and possibly
  “Automatic Zoom” displayed on it).

  Cheers, Roy

• +1

  I have had enough random problems with it I have turned it off on all systems I admin. This includes both Linux and windoze. Too many support calls. ESR
  is supposed to be stable. The pdf viewer is not.

  IMO the default should be an external pdf viewer until the thing is ready for prime time, although I guess it is hard to get it tested without making it the default.

  Regards,

• No need to guess. There’s plenty of evidence that at a certain point, software needs to be battle tested to shake the last bugs out.

  Take btrfs. It’s been included in shipping kernels for 5 years now, yet people keep asking “…but is it stable?” Why does the question come up? Because it isn’t the default filesystem. Since it isn’t installed on $BIGNUM percent of all existing Linux boxes, there is room for ignorance to sprout into doubt.

  Firefox’s PDF reader problems are certainly not all “bugs,” per se. PDF
  is a huge bag of complex features only loosely related. I can’t see Mozilla even *wanting* to implement every last behavior and feature defined by Adobe, much less accomplishing it. If your document depends on an unimplemented feature of PDF, it won’t render right, so you’re likely to call the viewer “broken,” even if every feature Firefox’s PDF
  reader /does/ implement is flawless.

  This isn’t about Firefox and Adobe. It’s about any software development team who’s set themselves the task of following the taillights of another software development team, while the latter has a bigger revenue stream. It’s an inferior strategy, if your goal is to win the race.

  Lots of examples of that:

  – octave vs Matlab
  – Libre/OpenOffice vs MS Office (document compatibility)
  – Wine/ReactOS vs Windows
  – SharpDevelop vs Visual Studio
  – Gimp vs Photoshop (PSD compatibility)

  If you’re tempted to give “IE vs Firefox” as a counterexample, notice that I specified a bigger revenue stream. It’s a necessary precondition. IE6 was leapfrogged by Firefox and Chrome because they have an independent revenue stream, while IE does not. IE also has to move around in legal leg irons that don’t hobble the others.

  Another non-counterexample: Linux vs big iron Unix. Big iron Unix priced itself out of the segment of the market that was outgrowing the economy as a whole. Now Linux calls the dance steps.