1298799 - [Mortar] Open basic PDF file correctly on Android

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[Yury Delendik (:yury)]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1268829 +++

The bug is to correctly render the basic pdf file on Android.
http://www.orimi.com/pdf-test.pdf

That's another important user story requested by users. And we still have users that are installing/requesting desktop PDF.js extension on Firefox for Android. See bug 834358 and bug 938235.

I'm wondering if work made on jsplugins and bug 1268829 can be used to build a viewer plugin for Android.

Comment 1

[Evelyn Hung]

Thanks for filing this bug. A quick thought of questions should be answered if we are going to adopt current jsplugin/PPAPI architecture to Android.

1. Is PDFium and its wrapper code could be built for Android? (I feel this is a most important question)
2. Does Android allow applications launch multiple processes?

I'm also curious why we didn't make pdf.js on Fennec? Is there any engineering difficulties?

Comment 2

[Yury Delendik (:yury)]

> I'm also curious why we didn't make pdf.js on Fennec? Is there any engineering difficulties?

The standard PDF.js desktop viewer requires more resources than needed for viewing on mobile devices and UI is not natural for the touch screens. The extension for desktop works on mobile Firefox without any change, but we never released or advertised it: there was different requirements for mobile apps, e.g. pinch zoom and less memory usage. (BTW, PDF.js is part of the Firefox OS)

Comment 3

[Evelyn Hung]

(In reply to Yury Delendik (:yury) from comment #2) 
> there was different requirements for mobile apps, e.g. pinch zoom and less memory usage. (BTW, PDF.js is part of the Firefox OS)

Yeah I know there are different requirements between desktop and mobile version, but given we have a version of PDF.js for FxOS, I thought we've resolve issues in terms of touch screen and memory usage.

I honestly have less confidence of migrating jsplugin/PPAPI architecture to Android because the whole implementation depends on an external code which might not be compatible with Android. :(  

Will review issues here when we complete a version for desktop. Thanks for the bug!

Comment 4

[Evelyn Hung]

I think this is out of this project's scope. Remove dependency.

Comment 5

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 6

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I'm closing this bug as WONTFIX per:

"The Mortar experiment has concluded. Mozilla does not consider the PDF use case justifies the burden of implementing and maintaining PDFium and a Pepper API implementation in Gecko."

Source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project