Document Rendering Helpers
A significant portion of the plug-in landscape belongs to programs that allow certain very traditional, “nonweb” document formats to be shown directly in the browser. Some of these programs are genuinely useful: Windows Media Player, RealNetworks RealPlayer, and Apple QuickTime have been the backbone of online multimedia playback for about a decade, at least until their displacement by Adobe Flash. The merits of others are more questionable, however. For example, Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office both install in-browser document viewers, increasing the user’s attack surface appreciably, though it is unclear whether these viewers offer a real benefit over opening the same document in a separate application with one extra ...
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