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Comment on Biggest Success of Y Combinator? Scribd

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Every time I click on a link which is a PDF file, I feel like I stepped on a dog's poop. Replacing that with Flash is not the solution: give me just normal HTML, my browser deals with scrolling and zooming just fine, don't reinvent the wheel.

Besides, after I switched to Ubuntu as my primary desktop, I actually like PDFs more than Scribd's flash "black holes", because Linux has a much nicer, lightweight and fast PDF viewer that quickly opens in it's own frame without freaking up the browser. And Gnumeric with AbiWord deal with Office files just fine, thank you.

Yes, there is (unfortunately) a lot of data in "non-Web" formats like PDF, Word and Excel. But converting them into yet another proprietary and non-browser (and search engine) friendly "black box" is NOT the solution.

So now, in addition to PDFs, I must learn to avoid scribd links as well. My freaking hot keys won't work if the mouse cursor happened to be over one of those "flash holes", and scrolling is not as fluid and fast. Do we need _another_ startup to solve this problem now?

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