Love ’em or hate ’em, PDFs are far from rare. Legal documents, official letters, and corporate reports – among many other things – are often found in this format rather than any other. It’s important, then, that the Google Chrome team has begun to take PDFs into account.
Don’t run off to view a PDF in Chrome just yet – you probably won’t get too far no matter how up-to-date your software is. And really, at this point, only true Chrome pioneers are meant to make use of the new feature.
But Marc Pawliger, an engineering director at Google, announced on the Chromium Blog, "[W]e are making available an integrated PDF viewing experience in the Chrome developer channel for Windows and Mac, which can be enabled by visiting chrome://plugins."
As for the next steps, Pawliger continued, "Linux support is on the way, and we will be enabling the integration by default in the developer channel in the coming weeks." PDF rendering quality, which apparently isn’t quite yet up to par, is also a priority.
The Chrome team will even give people the option of separately launching Adobe Reader, as well.
These upgrades could help Chrome bridge the gap between early adopters and the rest of the world. Or at the least, they should make the early adopters a little happier, and therefore more likely to stick with Chrome and eventually recommend it to others.