

Why did Google not write their PDF Reader for Chrome in Javascript? - hoodoof

Google normally fully embraces web technologies.  It is a bit of surprise then that the PDF viewing functionality in Chrome is implemented as a plugin rather than being written in Javascript.<p>Any ideas why they have taken this route?
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zzleeper
My guess is:

1) Speed. JS may be too slow to quickly parse such a complicated file format.
Remember that may PDFs may be very large in size

2) Complexity. This is the big one. PDFs are full of quirks that make html
pale. Thus, it was smarter to just use Foxit's already tested codebase than
start from zero.

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hoodoof
Firefox is bulding their PDF reader functionality using Javascript. I would
have thought that Google would have the technical chops to do it without it
being too slow.

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melling
Which one is faster? One of the goals of Chrome is to run on older hardware.
Also, if you're sticking with XP for a while longer, you'll need to move to
Firefox or Chrome, if you want a modern browser. The fastest browser for all
those legacy XP machines is Chrome.

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jdietrich
Pareto. They bought in their PDF engine from Foxit. Their product is fast,
lean, truly multiplatform and has countless man-years invested in dealing with
bugs and quirks.

Google are exceptionally good at identifying problems that matter. They invest
heavily in the stuff that yields the greatest results. When there are still so
many glaring problems in web browsing, implementing a PDF engine from scratch
is wasted effort.

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pvarangot
Maybe they didn't wrote it, as in they licensed the technology from someone
else for some parts of it. But it's just a guess...

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maushu
You wouldn't ask that if you checked the PDF File Format documentation. It's
scary. Really really scary.

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anothertodd
they just want to route it to google docs? Hmm, well I think they just hate
structure of PDF document.

