Mozilla's come right out and said what plenty of people think about PDF-reading browser plugins: they're often woefully insecure, generally replicate things browsers can already do and rely on proprietary technology.

Mozilla's answer is HTML 5 allied with the pdf.js project, which together allow a newly-released beta of Firefox to display PDFs without a plugin.

The results, displayed below, aren't a radical variation from the interface presented by PDF plugins.

Look Ma: no plugins!

But as Mozilla points out in this blog post, “the PDF viewer is capable of running on many platforms (PC’s, tablet, mobile) and even different browsers.” The organisation is hopeful things will only get better as browsers' JavaScript-crunching prowess improves. ®