Require Browser Plugin with XFA Support for Government Web Sites

Question

Most of the government sites I need to use on a regular basis now publish all of their forms in PDF with XFA, a popular one this time of year is income tax forms.  This is reasonable as there is no generally available alternative file format for this purpose.  However Adobe no longer supplies an Acrobat browser plugin for Firefox or Chrome on Linux.  I therefore cannot access these electronic forms.  I have tried using the no longer supported Acrobat 9.5 plug in, but it is broken under the latest version of Firefox (print doesn't work).  There is no other plugin that I can find that supports PDF forms using XFA.  How can I regain access to these forms.  When I try all I get is a message telling me to install the (non-existent) Adobe Acrobat plugin.

Answer 1

I was only using income tax filing as an example of this type of application.  For the sake of my privacy I would rather not specify exactly what government I am dealing with or what the purpose of the form is.  Suffice it to say that in this particular case the ONLY way to submit this form is through the paper form, and the only ways I can get a copy of the paper form are either to phone the office and have them mail me a blank form, or access the PDF file, which I cannot do because Adobe refuses to deliver a working browser plugin!  As explained in another reply the government web site does not present me with the URL of the actual PDF file, but rather with the URL of a server application that checks the capabilities of my PDF plugin and if it does not support XFA sends me instead a text message instructing me to install the Adobe browser plugin that Adobe refuses to make available!
I agree that PDF with XFA is an inappropriate way to implement this sort of application, and I would personally prefer an alternative.  For one thing using paper forms, even in electronic guise, costs more in the long run, since a civil servant must read the final paper document and enter the information into the government database, whereas if the client was presented with an ordinary web page the information could be entered directly by the client, and only validated by the clerk.  However in a transitional environment where only some of the clients have the ability to enter information into a web site many government applications will continue to be implemented in terms of paper forms.  In this environment it is important that all of the paper forms that have to be read by the data entry clerk look as much alike as possible.  That is why PDF is used because only PDF guarantees that all of the paper forms will be identically laid out.
In this particular situation the government department in question has spent $276,000,000 so far on this particular subsystem over the past 3 years and so far it takes more effort to process each transaction than it did on the older more manual system.