For Google Chrome users, viewing PDFs in the browser has been a colossal pain for lo these many moons. That’s why we are (and you should be) thrilled to learn that Google is rolling out a better way to look at PDFs in Chrome.
For the time being, Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer will be available through the beta version only. If you’re using the non-beta version of Chrome, you can download the beta to get the PDF-related improvements or enable the PDF viewer by typing about:plugins in address-bar and enable PDF viewer.
Googler John Abd-El-Malek wrote today on the Google Chrome blog, “To open a PDF document, you’d typically need to install additional software or browser plug-in in order to view it in a web browser.
“With the integrated Chrome PDF viewer now available in Chrome’s beta, you can open a PDF document in Chrome without installing additional software. The PDF document will load as quickly and seamlessly as a normal web page in the browser.” [Emphasis ours.]
With any luck, this will mean less waiting, less reloading and fewer blank pages where that pesky PDF should have been. We don’t see this so much as a slam on Adobe’s software; Google and Adobe play nicely in many other ways. The web simply needs faster ways to view and manipulate PDFs, and we’re glad Google’s working on the problem.
Chrome’s PDF viewer is sandboxed in the same way Chrome web pages are; this helps protect you, the end user, from malware embedded in PDFs.
Google’s team is still working on a few features for Chrome’s PDF viewer. Once those are finished, the stable version of Chrome will also ship with the PDF viewer included.
What do you think of this improvement? Will it make your browsing experience faster and easier?
Taken From Mashable and Edited.