GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 308254
Evince plug-in for Mozilla-based browsers
Last modified: 2006-03-27 19:46:53 UTC
There should be more transparency between information we download from the Internet. The user shouldn't care about what file-types and associated applications he should use. When the users clicks on a hyperlink that links to a pdf file, the user should not be confronted with the fact that is a pdf document. Instead, it should 'just work' and just display it right in the browser. Of course there should be an option to save these documents, but since so many people have broadband internet connections, does a user still care whether he or she bookmarks a html page or a pdf document? The user just want the computer to remember a piece of information whether that is stored as html or pdf.
Personally I hate pdf in browser. I think browser downloads/document opening should be simplified, but I dont see reasons to display the document inside the browser window. Bryan, what do you think?
I think the main reason you think so is that Adobe Acrobot is simply too slow. Evince doesn't have that problem.
While I agree with you in the spirit of what you're saying, in practice this turns out to be a wild goose chase worthy of the Lilliputians. Simply put, trying to make PDFs look and behave just like web pages is like trying to drive all of the roads in the world the same way. Even though there are highways, alleys, and roads of all sizes in between, you could try to ignore that and drive at break neck speeds on all of them. Or realize that some paths are built for different purposes than others and it's often best and easiest to respect that, than to idyllically ignore it. So the Evince team has chosen from the begining, for better or worse, to not be a plugin to browsers and be our own thing. And as always, marco is spot on that the download/document opening needs some real design and simplification.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 168933 ***