Why not just drop Flash and PDF support? Flash is dead and PDFs never needed to be rendered in browsers in the first place, they can already be opened through free, cross-platform, open source programs with all the features on the goal list.
As a counterpoint I love pdf support in the browser. People post pdf versions of most documents, papers, and presentations and viewing them in the browser makes the overall experience so much better! I actually have chrome as my default pdf viewer because it starts up faster than most other pdf viewers and I'm more used to it.
I've never understood why you even needed a browser plugin to do this. Why can't the browser just spawn a PDF viewer-app's COM server or equivalent, and then hand it a rendering context and send UI events back and forth—all without even knowing what exactly the filetype it's embedding is?
Flash is not entirely dead yet, so support can't be completely dropped. However, both Chrome [1] and Firefox [2] have announced long-term schedules for removing support for Flash, bit by bit.
As for PDF, the PDF viewers shipped in browsers seem to be much more hardened against attack than the stand alone ones people use, so as a practical matter, including a PDF viewer helps keep users safe.
In Windows 10, Reader was officially merged into Edge. The app that remains in the Windows Store will gently encourage you to use Edge instead. This seems part of the direction shift from simple task-focused apps (back) towards branded monolithic apps as Microsoft tries to find a healthy middle ground between good for mobile and convenient for old desktop users. (It's been a bigger deal of public concern with the Messaging/Phone/Skype apps back and forth shifts, but that hasn't been the only place this has been happening, as seen here with Reader, Reading List, and Edge.)
I remember that one. Before 8.1, it could not print PDFs. I have been struggling ever since to come up with an appropriate metaphor for how idiotic a PDF viewer without printing is.
Windows 8 tried to move all of printing into the Charms bar, which was a great idea in that something so common (so many apps need to print) would have one big place to nearly always find it, but of course was also a bad idea because learning the Charms required unlearning the idea that every app has its own Print button scattered somewhere possibly randomly in the app itself and learning the Charms instead.
So you could definitely print PDFs in Windows 8 from the Devices Charm. You'd just need to know that was what the Devices Charm was for.
(I thought the Charms were a good idea that Microsoft didn't quite know how to execute.)
OTOH, pdf.js is the first thing I disable in Firefox, since SumatraPDF and Atril render things much more quickly and lightly! :)
I can understand customer demand but I'd prefer if it was optional - e.g. the first time a user visits a PDF they're prompted to install a viewer if they so wish.
True, but since Windows (up until 7, and then on 10 as well) doesn't come with a PDF viewer by default, the only popular platform that guarantees a PDF viewer is OS X, which only makes up a small portion of Firefox users (7 percent as of 2009 [1], can't find newer statistics though), especially since Firefox is quite popular for GNU/Linux users.
And anyways, it all comes down to convenience. I know of many people who would much prefer viewing a PDF in their browser than having to switch between applications even though they're "techy enough" to install one. If people are happy with the PDF.js or some other in-browser PDF viewer, why make them switch?
I can assure you that Arch Linux and Manjaro do not come with a PDF viewer. Considering openSUSE is distribute with other desktop environments than those you listed, it doesn't seem to come with a PDF viewer by default (although it's possible that I missed some package that adds it anyways). Please don't spread misinformation without first researching the topic.
Of course you might get openSUSE in a flavor without a PDF viewer, but you could say the same thing about Ubuntu: Just get the Server edition. So when we're talking about "by default" I also consider the "default" flavor of those distributions.
OK, our experiences differ it seems. Maybe your docs are bigger or harder to render or something.
I mostly open < 50page docs, typically api specs etc. I guess they are converted from Word although hard to say.
Computers specs are 1 y.o. laptop, ssd, dual core intel with 16 GB memory and ssd.
I have expeeienced broken docs once or twice but nothing that really bothered me.
For me the convenience of normal Firefox search etc working is worth firing up an external pdf reader for once or twice a year.
I wonder if I haven't seens ome kind of web form or something where you could submit hard-to-render docs but this of course doesn't help if the docs are NDAed or something.
CBS.com requires flash and has lots of great content such as "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert". Also one of my banks requires Flash for online check deposit. If Firefox dropped flash, I'd drop Firefox.
When NSAPI plugins were around, I could use kpartsplugin to make PDFs render with KDE's PDF reader in the browser window. This was the perfect solution, and I'm still more than a little bit pissed that it's no longer available.
The reason Flash is still around is because of ads. Most (video) ads are served through Flash still and publishers still don't know how to switch, or don't want to.
Agreed. Advertisers are stupid these days. They don't realise that when they crap in their own backyard, nobody goes near them. If they want to misuse Flash (which they do, all the time) then we all stop using Flash. Most of us install ad blockers.
Folks might want to downvote me, but Flash ads are a big reason why people install adblockers. It's now shifting to JavaScript injections from ad networks, so it's only a matter of time before adblockers start analysing JavaScript to prevent them from misusing this mechanism also.
