I seriously hate Adobe Reader (and all desktop based PDF readers) – it is slow and potentially vulnerable. The browser hangs every time you open online PDF files using Adobe Reader. This inspired me to develop gPDF – which uses Google’s Docs Viewer to open online PDF files remotely.
Today, Google Chrome released a new dev channel update, which has an excellent feature: extension sync. Chrome has also rolled out an experimental plug-in for rendering PDF files. This plug-in uses advanced Chrome APIs, and renders PDF files just like another webpage.
Chrome developer team describes this as:
PDF files will render as seamlessly as HTML web pages, and basic interactions will be no different than the same interactions with web pages
Users can enable this Chrome PDF Viewer plug-in by visiting chrome://plugins/, which is under development at the moment. The PDF rendering quality is not as good as of Adobe Reader, and several features are currently missing there – but Chrome team promises improvements in future.
[ via Chromium Blog ]
One thing is for sure… it is faaaaaaaaaast!