Normally, we use Adobe Acrobat reader to open PDF documents on our computer, but now we can do so with a web browser i.e. Google Chrome. As shown by Google engineers at Chrome OS event recently, Google Chrome 8 beta can open PDF documents in the browser itself and as I tested, some huge documents (even of more than 1000 pages) and they open really fast in the browser.
Google Chrome can open local PDF files stored on your computer as well as files stored on web. To open PDF files from your hard disk, you need to right click on the PDF file icon and select “open with” from the right click menu. Now you need to locate Chrome.exe by clicking on “browse” button available on the “Program List” window. If you are using Windows 7 OS, then you may find chrome.exe at this location,
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C:\Users\user-name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
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Now select the chrome.exe available on the location mentioned above. That’s it, now you can see the document opening in the Chrome browser. You can read the pdf file over there without installing Adobe Acrobat reader.
Once the pdf files will open in Chrome, you can see few options on bottom-right corner of that window. There you can see options like “Stretch to full width, Normal Layout, Zoom In, Zoom Out”. I think they are more than sufficient for reading pdf files in proper manner.
For opening a pdf file from web, you just need to open the URL of the pdf file on Google Chrome. The pdf file will open in the browser without any issue.
Currently this feature of pdf reader in Chrome is in beta version of Google Chrome browser, which is expected to come in stable version very soon. Chrome is getting faster and faster in each upgrade, and getting so many new features as well. I think this PDF reader feature is definitely a welcome addition in Chrome.
Post your comment about this new feature of Google Chrome and also share your experience of using Chrome as PDF reader.