View in-browser PDFs in Google Chrome

Sep 30, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Typhoon14

To the best of my knowledge, no third-party PDF plugin on the Mac allows for the inline viewing of PDFs in Google Chrome, fortunately there is a way. As of Chrome 6, Google bundles an experimental PDF plugin, which is disabled by default.

To enable it:

You should now be able to view PDFs in Chrome. There are a few rough edges to this plugin. The occasional PDF will not display properly (in particular, it seems to choke on PDFs that have restrictions in effect — printing, copying, etc), but the vast majority show up just fine. The viewer is very fast, and has resizing controls available in the bottom-right corner of the window.

Note that there is currently no loading indicator for PDFs, so if you click on a large document, it may seem like the tab has frozen, but it is in fact just the PDF loading silently.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. It was fine with the couple of PDFs I tried.]

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