XulRunner deprecation, Eclipse SWT and Mozilla PDFJS

I currently spend a lot of work on System Concept DMS Document Management System. Last month I brought the project to the recent Apache PDF Box version 2.0.2 and Eclipse release.

Today I checked the Mozilla PDFJS version. PDFJS is used to have a full featured and fast PDF viewer in the DMS. PDFJS is JavaScript based and is intergrated via org.swt.Broswer.

I had to use the SWT.MOZILLA flag with the browser since PDFJS did not run with GTK webkit (Linux native) and Internet Explorer (Windows native).
The application has to be shipped with XulRunner 24.0 which is compatible with the SWT library.

With the old PDFJS version 1.2.109 this worked fine.

For testing I switched to current stable PDFJS 1.4.20. Unfortunately lots of images are not rendered anymore.
I believe that the outdated XulRunner version is the reason. I tried to find out if there is support for a newer one in the Eclipse Neon platform.

The result:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=474625

The XulRunner project is deprecated and there is no effort in the Eclipse team to get the latest version working with SWT. This is bad news.

Compatibiliy table

I tried to leave XulRunner and work with the native OS browsers (IE 11 for windows and GTK Webkit on Linux). The tests started hopefully but in the end serious problems occured.

For now XulRunner has to be used and shipped with the SWT application to get a stable PDFJS integration.

The follwing table summarized the test results.


Date: 07-28-2016

Eclipse: Neon 4.6, Build I20160606-1100

SWT: I found two jars in the plugins folder:

swt_3.105.0.v20160127-0039.jar
swt_3.105.0.v20160603-0902.jar

SWT.getVersion() returns 4623

OS	SWT Browser flag	Browser	PDFJS	Result
Windows 7	SWT.NONE	IE 11	All versions	PDF is not rendered In standalone IE 11 PDF 1.5.188 works but not embedded in SWT
	SWT.MOZILLA	XulRunner 24	1.2.109	OK
			1.4.20	Not tested
			1.5.188	Not tested
		XulRunner 31	1.2.109	Not tested
			1.4.20	OK
			1.5.188	OK
Ubuntu 14.04.1	SWT.NONE	GTK WebKit	1.2.109	PDF is not rendered
		GTK WebKit	1.4.20, 1.5.188	PDF rendered but VM crashes when resizing browser widget
	SWT.MOZILLA	XulRunner 24	1.2.109, 1.5.188	OK
			1.4.20	Rendered but images missing
		XulRunner 31	All versions	Browser widget cannot be created. Known bug.
Windows 10	Not systematically tested yet. SWT.MOZILLA + XulRunner 24 + PDFJS 1.2.109 works

Browser features and versions is a mess!