Chrome's PDF Viewer

When Chrome 8 (stable) was released this was part of the announcement: In addition to the over 800 bug fixes and stability improvements, Chrome 8 now contains a built in PDF viewer that is secured in Chrome’s sandbox.

The odd thing is that this Viewer has been present since version 6 and a Googler indicated that it was sandboxed from day one.

The real difference is that it comes enabled by default. The consequence was that there was a flood of posts of surprise and dismay and of how to revert to the Adobe plug-in!

It's quite possible that this move was a calculated gamble by Google to get as many complaints in as quick a time as possible!

Apart from the downright lack of features compared to the Adobe plug-in, there are quite a few rendering issues, especially relating to pdfs contained in frames that cause the entire page contents to magically shrink (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64506).

Many right-click options also do not work on pdfs in frames and these need to be opened in a new tab before the pdf can be saved.

From all appearances, it appears that making the pdf viewer the default really stirred people to action whereas while it was available as an option, it was barely noticed.

Incidentally, I didn't come across a single concern about the Adobe plug-in's security issues

In edit: it appears we should use pdf files rather than just pdfs since the correct expansion of pdf is portable data format!

 

The Chrome plugin can be disabled (at least in v. 9.x).

I seldom use it since the PDF downloads are normally intercepted by the download manager (Internet Download Manager), the files are downloaded and opened with my default viewer (PDF-XChange Viewer).

 

It can be disabled in earlier versions from aboutlugins.

 

Due to limited features and above said problems, I have disabled it too (Google Chrome 8.0.552.215) and am using Adobe Acrobat plugins (10.0.0.396) without any issue.