Viewing PDFs directly inside Chrome

Chrome provides several ways for users to have a better experience on the web, including an easy-to-use interface, short start up times, and advanced features for developers.

One of the features that has made life even easier for users is the introduction of extensions to the platform. With extensions, Chrome is now able to add features that might be useful to users, without requiring them to be programed by Google. In fact, Chrome extensions will work without even requiring the browser to restart.

An extension that was recently introduced allow users to have much easier access to PDF files. PDF is the standard format for formatted files that need to be printed, and are used everywhere. However, it has always been a little difficult to work with PDFs, because they require an external plugin. Although the plug in is easy to use, it doesn't behave exactly like the browser, so it sometimes clumsy to use.

The Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension allows PDFs to be displayed in an HTML page, just like any other document. The service is provided by Google, but the result is very easy to use.

The main advantage of using this extension to Chrome is that it will open PDFs much faster than calling a PDF reader. Also, once the page is loaded, it can be easily manipulated as any other HTML page. It doesn't behave as a separated application inside browser, it is just the browser displaying a document.

If you install this extension and want to get the real PDF (for archival reasons, for example), you can still save it to the hard drive. The process is the same as for other documents: right click on the link, and select the file name where Chrome will save the document. That is all you need to get a copy of the PDF on your computer.

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