Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Embedded PDF viewer in Chrome

Thursday, November 4, 2010 | 9:20 AM

With every Google Chrome release, we hope to bring new features and improvements that will make your life on the web speedier, simpler, and more secure. Today, we’re excited to introduce the integrated PDF viewer to the beta channel.

PDF is a popular file format that’s used for delivering documents on the web (such as the IRS W-4 tax form). To open a PDF document, you’d typically need to install additional software or a 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.

Just like we do with web pages viewed in Chrome, we’ve built in an additional layer of securitycalled the “sandbox” around the Chrome PDF viewer to help protect you from malware and security attacks that are targeted at PDF files. For now, the Chrome PDF viewer is available only in the beta channel, but we look forward to adding more polish and features, as well as making it widely available in the stable channel soon.