Google Makes Latest Chrome Build Open PDFs By Default

An anonymous reader writes "Google is changing the way its browser handles PDF files, starting with the Chrome Canary channel. Citing security concerns, the company wants Chrome to open PDF files by default, bypassing any third-party programs such as Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader."

I'm OK with that...

[tibit]

On older laptops - those that reasonably work well only with XP, I not only install Chrome as the best performing browser, but I also advise people to use it to view PDFs. Note that viewing a PDFs is very different than filling it out etc. A viewer needs to be simple and well performing, and in my experience, even on 10+ year old hardware, Chrome shines there. So, for one, I do welcome this change.

hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[raymorris]

For that matter QNX, a complete graphical OS including essential programs like a web browser and even a web server is a couple MB - smaller than many odd DOCUMENTS.

I wonder how blazingly fast a 4MB OS is on 4GHz machine with GBs of RAM. The CPU could process the entire OS in less than a millisecond.

Re:Great

[mbkennel]

| Because we love formats which are impossible to convert into any other format; which require complicated, ugly tools to perform even basic formatting,

This is a feature, not a bug. It's not just a feature, it is THE feature.

I'm very serious. Plenty of times an 'editable' PowerPoint is substantially garbled when it's opened up on a different version, or some Office configuration changed, or it's on somebody else's installation or it's 3 years old, or it needed an equation plugin, or the fonts are whatever...

If I have an important presentation---"save as PDF" is essential. I want to be able to give away (and use) poorly-editable copies which Microsoft programs will NOT do anything to.

That is an essential feature.

| and because we desperately need a format which essentially displays graphics and text to require weekly updates to remove the latest batch of exploits.

PDF isn't the problem. Adobe is that problem. MacOS and other software display PDF fine.

Re:Great

[HJED]

I don't know about the chrome one, but in Firefox the inbuilt PDF viewer correctly displays less than half the pdfs I open. This is primarily due to its terrible Unicode support (worse than slashdot), but also due to failures in displaying pretty much anything that isn't text.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm very serious. Plenty of times an 'editable' PowerPoint is substantially garbled when it's opened up on a different version, or some Office configuration changed, > or it's on somebody else's installation or it's 3 years old, or it needed an equation plugin, or the fonts are whatever...

Most of the times it's Microsoft's fault, changing format with every release (is it a subtle play at forcing everyone to upgrade?) A well maintained document format (e.g.: ODF) wouldn't have that issue. Today, many businesses are forced to maintain 2-3 versions of MS Office (each with its own copy of Windows) so they can open documents sent by others.

On the plugins front: I agree.
Equations are a standard part of the document format.
Fonts: MS Office doesn't even have the option to embed fonts in PDFs (probably because they want to push their own alternate "portable" document format called XPS, a failure.)