Google Chrome Adds Native PDF Viewer

Google Chrome is taking Good advantage of Google’s latest deal with Adobe. They added Flash as a native feature for Google Chrome, and now here comes a native PDF viewer.

Today, we are making available an integrated PDF viewing experience in the Chrome developer channel for Windows and Mac, which can be enabled by visiting chrome://plugins. Linux support is on the way, and we will be enabling the integration by default in the developer channel in the coming weeks.

With this effort, we will accomplish the following:

• PDF files will render as seamlessly as HTML web pages, and basic interactions will be no different than the same interactions with web pages (for example, zooming and searching will work as users expect). PDF rendering quality is still a work in progress, and we will improve it substantially before releasing it to the beta and stable channels.
• To further protect users, PDF functionality will be contained within the security “sandbox” Chrome uses for web page rendering.
• Users will automatically receive the latest version of Chrome’s PDF support; they won’t have to worry about manually updating any plug-ins or programs.

Currently, we do not support 100% of the advanced PDF features found in Adobe Reader, such as certain types of embedded media. However, for those users who rely on advanced features, we plan to give them the ability to launch Adobe Reader separately. from blog.chromium.org

So, we are getting new features every day here on Google Chrome Valley .. are you enjoying the stay ?

How to Enable Default PDF Viewer

If you’re running the dev channel, here’s how to turn on the internal PDF viewer:
enter chrome:plugins in your Omnibar
scroll down to the entry for Chrome PDF Viewer
click the enable link, and you’re good to go.

I was using this feature as an extension earlier. Now using this feature as default, I can see things loading faster. Are you experiencing any change in the performance ?

Earlier, this feature used to work in a little different way, with the extension. When you click on a PDF document, it will be redirected to a page on google docs, and rendered using a gview script in Google Docs. Now, you will not get redirected, instead, you see the document on the original url.

Related posts:

1. Gmail Makes Chrome Its Default PDF Viewer For Attachments I think the Gmail team read my last post and decided to do something cool  ”How to Use Google Chrome As Your Default PDF Reader...
2. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer Extension for Google Chrome If you are someone researching for some serious information on the web, say for your college or school, you will find loads of PDF files...
3. Make Google Chrome Your Default PDF Viewer in Windows – Video Tutorial Looks like my friend here, Apruler2012 has started a new blog with Google Chrome tips. He has some interesting tips, with video tutorials. Good luck bro...