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."

Comments

Great

[sexconker]

Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.
The Chrome PDF viewer is shit. So is the Firefox one. They're fine for viewing most basic PDFs, but anything more involved (forms, interactive PDFs, portfolios, etc.) and they both just shit the bed.

Re:Great

[LunaticTippy]

I understand hating the built in viewers, but to me they are a blessing. There are so many things that are PDFs for no reason. I really appreciate a quick and dirty way to see PDFs, and with my usage it is good enough 90% of the time. For the interactive ones etc. I tend to recognize which ones aren't going to work so I just download the file. On unfamiliar systems I always grit my teeth when clicking a link causes a 20 second delay while Adobe Viewer lurches from the shadows and demands to be updated.

Re:Great

[DavidClarkeHR]

Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.

No problem with anti-competitive practices, or inferior-by-default programs. Just don't make your system administrator ... administer anything else.

Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give me a prompt to save/open/cancel any day. I miss the good old days.

Re:Great

[vlueboy]

Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

Same reason why we "even" hold onto Word files: it's not that we *create* them, but that they're PUSHED hard to us by other content creators for work reasons. In a digital world, they are transmission and retention standards*. Our only influence is issuing private complaints to whoever sends us the files, but sometimes their workflow or software removes any say they personally have in the matter, as much automation outputs exclusively to pdf.

We can't be judging standard fatigue till *we* stop sending all our own non-trivial stuff in them. We tend to have "important" docs like high-quality resumes (*.doc is shifty for that), digital copies of your e-filed tax returns, blueprints, and certain legal docs and paystubs that just GOTTA be assured to look the same in all platforms. Thus, no, our trying to change the world by pasting into plain text, taking a screenshot, or giving a link to an [insecure] HTML server doesn't fix the issue. Sending a doc in some esoteric typeset format? ditto.

Just like the "solution" to facebook we all know, what will fix this one problem it is the appearance of yet another a run-everywhere competitor. Sadly, none of those tend to be very Free & Open

* Remember zip files?

Re:Great

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

I myself tend to like PDFs for print materials because it's pretty much the only format that is guaranteed to scale exactly as shown. When I scan documents, or create documents that are primarily going to be used in print form, it's pretty much a given that they'll always be PDF's.

For anything else though they're annoying.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Chrome PDF viewer is shit. So is the Firefox one. They're fine for viewing most basic PDFs.." ..leastways, two of the above sentences are true. There is fucking *nothing* fine about the Firefox PDF viewer, at all. Not only does it fuck up the formatting of more or less *every* PDF that isn't a full page A4 scan, it also fucks them up for Adobe Reader by saving, and it appears additionally impossible to cache the fucking things.

Seriously, Firefox is otherwise grand, but why, oh fucking why, did that POS viewer become a fucking default? - it really, truly, does suck, sorry.

Re:Great

[rsilvergun]

Because PDFs open up correctly on just about any computer and PDF printers make it simple for end users to use a skill they already have (printing documents, and don't laugh, for a lot of people it was something they had to learn with real effort).

Re:Great

[Threni]

> Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

Because we love formats which are impossible to convert into any other format; which require complicated, ugly tools to perform even basic formatting, and because we desperately need a format which essentially displays graphics and text to require weekly updates to remove the latest batch of exploits.

Re:Great

[colinrichardday]

Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

Can you even generate Word docs from LaTeX files?

Re:Great

[LordLimecat]

Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.

Use the chrome GPO templates, thats sort of why theyre there.

Re:Great

[gigaherz]

Because they do what they are supposed to do well enough, and they have a large corporation backing and supporting the format.

If you don't like PDF, you should propose an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical -- or as close to it as possible, anywhere you see it. It should support rendering formatted and spaced text, images, composite images for scanned documents, vector graphics, forms, digital signing, ... and any other feature PDF may have that people want to use.

OpenXPS does all of that already, but since it was designed by Microsoft, it may not be acceptable to you.

Re:Great

[sexconker]

Great. Another configuration change to manage on all our workstations.

Use the chrome GPO templates, thats sort of why theyre there.

Of course. But my list of shit to deal with just went from 2395720 items to 2395721 items. A drop in the ocean, sure, but FUCK each and everyone one of those unnecessary drops.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Complaining about the quality of a PDF viewer is like complaining about the taste of a shit sandwich.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give me a prompt to save/open/cancel any day. I miss the good old days.

You can disable individual Chrome pug-ins - including the PDF viewer - in Settings -> Content Settings. I'm sure there are other ways to get to that setting.

Re:Great

[icebike]

Agreed, I actually PREFER to have Chrome open a pdf, because its one less virus ridden file I have to deal with.
I'm still given the option of saving it if I want. Chrome itself seems to recognize which PDFs it can't handle, and prompts for download.
(but those are PRECISELY the ones you have to worry about the most. )

I really don't understand why this is news, since Chrome has been doing this for years now.
(At least since 2010 according to TFA).

Maybe they will enhance it enough such that we don't need to run any Adobe software. With Adobe dropping linux support
all together, there are no fully capable alternatives.

Re:Great

[mysidia]

No problem with anti-competitive practices, or inferior-by-default programs. Just don't make your system administrator ... administer anything else.

Before you diss it, or decide to be heavyhanded and think you need to override Google's choice, because you have to do one more thing.... talk to your security administrator.

The change creates a minor inconvenience for a small number of uses, and greatly reduces a major security risk.

Now if only MS, Google, and FF would all agree to put out security updates for all versions to block the Java browser plugin from running permanently, once and for all.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If a new feature is added by way of an update, it should prompt for its settings the first time it becomes relevant. So on the first click on a PDF the browser should prompt: "you can now view PDFs within the browser, enable / disbale this feature / let me try once and prompt me again." It shouldn't silently enable the feature and let the hapless user hunt in the settings for a way to disable it, that's just rude.

Re:Great

[Cajun Hell]

anything more involved (forms, interactive PDFs, portfolios, etc.) and they both just shit the bed.

It's 2013 and still not a single documented sighting of any user ever wanting any of those things from a PDF. Thus, it sounds like you're saying Chrome perfectly does everything, that anyone might ever need.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

| 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

This. I was doing literal rocket science (a project for the ISS) and Solidworks document printing was incessantly moving things around (typically on top of something else, making both notations illegible). I printed always to PDF, fixed the errors in PDF, and then submitted *that* paper to the controlling authority (JAXA, in this case). I couldn't trust Solidworks to print what it said it would. I could trust PDF.

AC

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.

Re:Great

[HJED]

Hear, Hear.
If you going into the applications settings in firefox you can change it to use the adobe reader plugin again, but I doubt adobe will continue to support the plugin.

Re:Great

[HJED]

I don't know about chrome, but the firefox reader fails to render correctly 60% of PDFs I open. I also use PDF forms, which are extremely useful if you need to type on an official form rather than writing it out. (MS Word consistency isn't good enough for that).

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it because it is easy to export from MS Word and pretty much everyone can read it. I use MS Word because it is pretty much a corporate standard. Also, it is nice that people can save the file and read it whenever and whereever they like. And mostly everyone understands what it is and is able to view it.

Re:Great

[ne0n]

If it doesn't support js/embedded flash/whatever shitty thing Adobe thinks of next, I'm all for it. PDF is bloated past recognition. This atavistic approach makes sense.

Re:Great

[geminidomino]

That's because that's what they were supposed to be for, until Adobe decided to start shitting into bags and hanging them off the side of the standard.

Re:Great

[Antique Geekmeister]

> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical

You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.

One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards. Another is that it is possible to get commercial support for it, and a third is that it supports some useful "fill-in-blanks" formats. But consistent document formatting is not a reason to prefer PDF over LaTeX. Another is its very tight integration with most powerful web browsers, which does tend to make things faster than loading up the separate view application.

Re:Great

[gl4ss]

yeah that's how it is now but what the fuck is wrong with bringing up the dialog with options if you have multiple pdf capable apps like it is now?

Re:Great

[zippthorne]

Why not? It works for Facebook.

Re:Great

[djdanlib]

Yup, especially restaurant menus, which are *always* in PDF. It's frustrating when you're on mobile and just want to see the menu before you commit a large party with diverse dietary restrictions to going somewhere.

Re:Great

[djdanlib]

You jest, but I'm sure I've rolled my face around on my keyboard and produced a Perl script that does that.

Re:Great

[thegarbz]

The news is that Chrome only ever opened PDFs by default if Acrobat wasn't installed.

Now they're giving the big middle finger to Adobe saying we think your reader for your format is insecure so we're going to open PDFs regardless of what you do. That is quite a significant change.

Re:Great

[sexconker]

Thanks, but our users do use those things.
The only thing we want them to use is forms (simple fill in, not submit, email, monitor, etc.).

Re:Great

[icebike]

That's simply not true.
I have both Adobe and Foxit installed and MOST PDFs open via Chrome.

Re:Great

[Zordak]

> an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical

You mean LaTeX, or its modern descendant tetex, I think. Or the original Postscript standard, which has been effectively replaced by the open source tool ghostscript in most environments due to some outrageous licensing fees from Adobe.

One reason to use PDF is that it is a de factor standard, not becuase it actually renders more consistently than those older standards. Another is that it is possible to get commercial support for it, and a third is that it supports some useful "fill-in-blanks" formats. But consistent document formatting is not a reason to prefer PDF over LaTeX. Another is its very tight integration with most powerful web browsers, which does tend to make things faster than loading up the separate view application.

You're comparing apples and oranges. PDF and LaTeX are not competitors; they are complementary. LaTeX is just a text processing language. Your .tex file will not display anything correctly. It's a plain text file. The default output for LaTeX is PostScript, which is not really intended for display (it's just printer commands). So you will need a program capable of rendering .ps files to view it. Hence, ghostscript, which is not a competing format to postscript, but rather a suite of tools for working with postscript, including rendering it on screen. And most .tex files will just as happily crank out a PDF with pdflatex, and you can view that with any number of viewers.

The only real competitor I've seen for PDF is Microsoft's XPS, and I'm not aware of how or why it's inherently better. But in any case, the format is not the problem. The reader is the problem. Hence, Google's move.

Re:Great

[colinrichardday]

I'm quite serious. Converting a LaTeX file to pdf is typing pdflatex foo.tex. If you use pstricks, do latex foo.tex; dvips foo.dvi -o; ps2pdf foo.ps. The -o option in the dvips command outputs to file rather than prints. The default file name is obtained by replacing the dvi with ps.

I'm sure I've rolled my face around on my keyboard and produced a Perl script

FTFY.

Re:Great

[thegarbz]

You can claim that all you want. You're an edge case, maybe as a result of playing with some settings at some point. Since version 8 the PDF viewer only worked by default if the Adobe PDF extension was not present on the system. Clicking on a PDF will bring it up at the bottom in the download bar along with a security warning saying the file type may harm your computer. It also greyed out the option to always download that filetype.

Do a search on the Google forums. There's plenty of threads asking how to work around this issue. The easiest way is to disable Adobe PDF in about:plugins. Then Chrome takes over again and stops the download bullshit.

Version 31 reverses this behaviour.

Re:Great

[aliquis]

I have Evince installed and Chromium show no PDFs at all afaik. It just download and warn about opening them.

Re:Great

[aliquis]

.. and YouTube.

Re:Great

[David Byers]

Yes. It's called tex4ht and does a surprisingly good job of producing something that can be mangled into presentable shape in a finite amount of time.

Re:Great

[gigaherz]

Not "de facto", it's an ISO standard. OpenXPS in turn was standarized by ECMA. Also, ghostscript is a Postscript processor, its main purpose is to print (render) Postscript files, be it into an actual printer, into image files, or into PDF .

Re:Great

[Bert64]

No, some restaurant menus are actually in flash which is even worse than pdf... At least the pdf files will view on most mobiles, flash is completely unusable.
Several restaurants have lost my custom because their menus were in flash.

Re:Great

[gigaherz]

XPS is based on the xml-in-a-zip-file paradigm, specifically, the Open Packaging Conventions format, as used by docx and xlsx. In most aspects, PDF and XPS have identical features: both use explicit positioning, formatting and spacing of objects in the document; both support compression, encryption, and some sort of "DRM" schemes. They differ in the details, such as the image formats they support: XPS favors TIFF and JPEG XR, over PDF's Jpeg2000 and JBIG.

In my opinion, OpenXPS is a better format for the Web simply because it's built from formats that the web already supports widely: ZIP and XML. That means it should be much simpler for web browsers to display XPS content without the need of (internal or external) plugins.

Re:Great

[temcat]

I really appreciate a quick and dirty way to see PDFs

I dunno about Chrome, but the built-in viewer in Firefox is not quick at all. And documents look butt-ugly in it.

Re:Great

[houghi]

The reason is that they use Word to make their PDFs to print them out. This saves time. Just upload the one you used for printing.

To me it seems if you can not be bothered about the presentation on a website, will you bother with details in your kitchen?

Talking resyaurant websites. It seems that especially high end restaurants have terrible websites. Just two examples of high end restaurants:
http://www.thefatduck.co.uk/
http://www.cellercanroca.com/index.htm
As great as their food is, as lousy is their website. Seriously: what were they thinking? If they treat the food as they treat their website, McD should be the highest quality food.

Re:Great

[MurukeshM]

When did you last test it? Most of my files open well enough. I'm on 25.0

Re:Great

[jones_supa]

The Chrome one is fast.

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.)

Re:Great

[__aaltlg1547]

There is a good reason for their being PDFs. That's to make them readable and printable on almost any machine running almost any system. they could have exported them to html but that wouldn't make them automatically have identical pagination on every system regardless of browsers, screen size and other things that are relevant for documents primarily intended for print.

I agree with the overall 90%, except in my case it's more like 98% of the time I only want the document to read and maybe print. If the default reader has options to save, download, print, zoom and search, it's good enough for in browser use for me, and if it DOESN'T support all those system-infecting embedded code features, that's a bonus. It means I won't have to download biweekly security updates.

Re:Great

[devent]

How so? It's more insecure in the long term, because now Google have to support not only a web browser but a Pdf viewer. And both have a long history of being insecure. Insecure+Insecure!=more secure. But because it's from Google you think it's going to be magically more secure?

I would rather think that Google will either drop the ball on either the browser part or the PDF part in the long term. And it will not be the PDF part that will get less support from Google. Expect to hear news of security exploits in Chrome based on their PDF viewer.

Re:Great

[hairyfeet]

But you are missing the point in that it should be YOUR choice and NOT Google's as to which is default.

Lets face it, it would be insanely easy to have a simple checkbox on first install or upgrade that simply asks "Would you like us to be the default PDF viewer?" so that those like yourself that don't have a preference can simply leave the box checked and those of us that do have a preference (in my case its Sumatra for the home users and Foxit or Adobe depending on the business) wouldn't have to go mucking about in some about:config PITA.

I don't know about everybody else but I'm really getting tired of companies deciding I can't even be trusted with a simple yes/no question. Maybe its just me but every time i see something like this to me it just reeks of condescension, this "You are too fucking dumb to make choices so take what you are given" bad attitude too many companies have.

I just hope that Comodo Dragon disables this and just asks the user, so far they have been pretty good about leaving choices to the user with their chromium fork so far.

Re:Great

[hairyfeet]

Ya know I keep hearing all this about "PPT hosed my presentation" or "Word ate my homework" or whatever but frankly I've never run into a more backwards compatible or well behaved program than MS Office, not by a longshot. I have 2K7 on my main system, the fiance has 2K3 and on my netbook I have the truly ancient 2K and sharing files between them what do I get? Perfect files every time.

So I have to wonder how much of it is PEBKAC because one blessing and curse about MSFT software is the fact it will let you go waaay overboard when it comes to formatting, even if the final result of said formatting is a mes that won't open. Because I've handled huge docs, PPTs with embedded pics and Access DBs and more programs made from Access than I are to count and no matter which version I use or my customers have it always seems to "just work"

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, it is so much faster to open PDFs in Firefox. If it has content that I cannot view, I just click on the button, and Poof! It's THE the best things that ever happened to my online PDF viewing experience. There are only a few instances where I actually need to click on the "View in other viewer" button, it's actually a pretty decent viewer. I don't curse anymore when I open PDFs online the way I used to.

Re:Great

[Derek Pomery]

Ditto. Problems are fairly rare these days.

Re:Great

[ergean]

This... had more calls about this issue then any other. Instead of gracefully give you an option to open a complex pdf (think tax forms) in something else it spits a rather stupid message about updating your pdf viewer.

Re:Great

[Antique Geekmeister]

Unfortunately, the "ISO standard" for PDF is not complete. What Adobe tools publish, and expect clients to use, does not actually follow the ISO. Interestingly, Aladding ghostscript and the freeware ghostscript releases seem to do a much better task of rendering standards compliant PDF.

I'm afraid your point has been lost. You pointed out that PDF was to display documents in the intended format, and I gave you 2 examples that work well and have for years. Your original point that other standards should support "forms, digital signing, ... and any other feature PDF may have that people want to use" are not well supported in those tools I mentioned. But those features are precisely why PDF has become so difficult to manage, so dangerous in security terms, and so bulky in system resources to use. Simpler and safer tools for displaying document content, and for handling forms or embedded images, were available before PDF. It's the insistence on melding and merging them into one huge tool suite that have destabilized

Re:Great

[colinrichardday]

I was aware that tex4ht could produce HTML output. I wasn't aware (nor does the man page mention) that it can produce doc output.

Re:Great

[iviv66]

At work I deal with contracts; These are written up in word and then saved as PDF files to be printed off and signed by contractors. Giving them the base word document would allow them to easily alter things and we would have to spend time reading through every single contract to see what was changed, whereas here if they change anything it is obvious, and we can call them up to discuss. Of course they could also be saved as images, but why would you do something like that?

Re:Great

[gigaherz]

Exactly, PDF is attractive because it does everything the big paying customers have asked for. Together with the viewer being free, it has meant that the format is attractive for both corporations (pay once, get all the features), and users (download just one one free program, and you get both a browser plugin, and a standalone viewer). Yes, it's a mess, I know, I have contributed to the PDF.js project (the javascript library powering Mozilla's integrated PDF Viewer) in the past, but regardless the point is that it already does all of that, people have already paid for the software, and have familiarized themselves to it, so it would take some convincing for any alternative format to replace it.

Re:Great

[cupantae]

now Google have to support not only a web browser but a Pdf viewer

I don't think that's relevant. Each of Google and Adobe have lots of other software that they have to support. The fact that the PDF viewer sits inside the browser doesn't really affect its maintenance.

both have a long history of being insecure

...unlike Adobe Reader?

I would rather think that Google will either drop the ball on either the browser part or the PDF part in the long term.

Why? They're both important and need to be maintained.

Expect to hear news of security exploits in Chrome based on their PDF viewer.

Expect to hear news of security exploits in all popular software. I'm already sick of hearing about exploits in Acrobat.

I think a move towards multiple viewers will help PDF as a standard, and a move away from Adobe's software in particular will mean less resources used to just open a PDF. Personally, I think the likes of Evince and Sumatra are best for lightness and accuracy.

Re:Great

[Antique Geekmeister]

The inherent instability of software that does not follow its own published specifications, the burdensome bulk and inherently insecure nature of the of the those "free" versions of those tools from Adobe, and the cost of the development tools for writing documents that provide those new features are all powerful reasons to avoid Adobe's tools. The point that you note that "it's a mess, I know", is a hint that there are fundamental issues with the standard.

That people "already paid for the software" is a common one, and understandable. But at some point, the continuing labor and testing and support cost of overly complex software accumulates to where it's actually much cheaper to discard it. I'm not certain where that point is with PDF, but there are certainly well-tested technologies that could take over the document display role.

Re:Great

[devent]

icebike was talking that he is expecting that Pdf will be more secure (or in his words "because its one less virus ridden file I have to deal with"). I think it's fallacious to expect that, because it combines two most used security exploits in one application: web and Pdf. Just like web and Java applets, which led to the stigmatization of Java applets.

Furthermore, Google's focus is on the web and not on PDF. So I totally expect that in the long term PDF support will be diminished and security holes will be found that are not a priority for Google because it's PDF. It's easier for Google to say: just don't use PDFs.

Re:Great

[HJED]

When did you last test it?

Today, on 25.0. I find it still has terrible unicode support, struggles to render older pdfs, can't fill out pdf forms, and crashes frequently. It also seems to take longer than Adobe reader to open larger pdfs.
The majority of the pdfs I use fall into one of the above categories.

Re:Great

[HJED]

Same for me. I hardly ever use the button to open it in another viewer.

Neither do I because I disabled it, however I do go back and test it every now and then and the best I could say is the loading time matches that of Adobe reader. For large pdfs it is much, much slower and often crashes. (On 25.0)

Re:Great

[Antique Geekmeister]

> LaTeX is just a text processing language. Your .tex file will not display anything correctly. It's a plain text file.

You've a good point. But PDF is also a text file: as is evident form opening PDF document with a text editor. Both need to be processed for viewing. LaTeX has an intermediate stage, a "DVI" file that is effectively an intermediate format, and can then be processed to Postscript, PDF, or other display formats. Writing the original document, and doing the layout work, in LaTeX is both safer and more reliable, than doing so with Adobe's feature filled PDF crafting tools.

Re: Great

[Sigg3.net]

Apple knows Apple users either call a cab or a limo service. Trains are for working class, not creative or life-fulfilling better people. Read the EULA.

Re:Great

[jon3k]

More like 99.9% of the time. The only time I need anything other than the built in PDF viewer is when I need to edit and save a PDF.

Re:Great

[LunaticTippy]

I don't think a restaurant has to care about their website to have good food. Some of my favorite restaurants don't have a website. They don't need one. Many others have a rudimentary one their nephew made in the 90s and it has never been updated.

Sure, there are many restaurants that care way more about marketing than anything else, and they should have a truly world class website.

Re:Great

[sexconker]

Using PDF forms? Your IT procurement people are very, very naive and trusting... er, stupid.

You're a moron. A PDF form is simply a document with text fields people can fill in and print (and potentially save). They have nothing to do with procurement, they're simply a template users use.

adobe reader.

[Anonymous Coward]

somehow adobe reader installer is bigger than a JRE install.

how can a document renderer, basically a postscript web browser with ALL THE FUNCTIONS REMOVED, be bigger than an virtual computer in your computer?

Re:adobe reader.

[Great Big Bird]

I don't think you understand what Adobe Reader is.

Re:adobe reader.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what Adobe Reader is.

Or a JRE, for that matter.

Re:adobe reader.

[mysidia]

how can a document renderer, basically a postscript web browser with ALL THE FUNCTIONS REMOVED, be bigger than an virtual computer in your computer?

Ah.... what you are missing is clear now. You missed the point that a PDF viewer is a virtual computer in your computer.

Among other things.... PDFs can contain scripts and various executable bits. What do you think the major source of security issues in PDF is?

How so very secure!

[themushroom]

And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.

Re:How so very secure!

[girlintraining]

And another example of some tools wanting to be the do-all where they weren't asked and don't belong.

I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not. Save it to disk; and let me worry about what to do with it. Everytime you add more features, more code, you add more vulnerabilities.

Knock it the fuck off, Google. Get your head together: We liked Chrome because it was fast and minimalist. If I wanted a bloated up kitchen sink I'd go with Firefox. Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!

Re:How so very secure!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would prefer if the browser stick to rendering only what the standards tell it to: CSS, HTML, PNG, JPEG, GIF... these are all standards. "Adobe PDF" is not.

However ISO 32000-1 is a standard.

Firefox is the emacs of browsers. Chrome is supposed to be the vi. Stop trying to make vi into Emacs!

*backs away slowly*

Re:How so very secure!

[LordLimecat]

Back in reality, this will stop a large number of infections from occurring.

Re:How so very secure!

[girlintraining]

However ISO 32000-1 is a standard.

Because a bunch of companies paid a fuckton to have it become a standard, yeah. Google up the history on that... a lot of money was handed out to get an ISO working group and get it stamped as a standard. It was bought and paid for by Adobe. So there's that.

There's also the fact that PDFs don't belong in a browser anyway. It's an outgrowth of PCL, a language for printing documents out of the 90s. It's not multimedia, and every attempt to make it web-friendly is a bandaid that opens large numbers of vulnerabilities up.

Don't put it in the browser. For the love of god don't put it in. Standard or no standard it's a shit technology.

Re:How so very secure!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has PDF support as well, it uses javascript to display PDFs, the JS program converts the PDF to HTML and the browser displays that. I'm not sure what Chrome does, it might be native code but the principle is the same.

Yo dawg, suppose I wrote a PDF renderer in Javascript, and embedded that renderer in a PDF, so that Firefox's Javascript could render it and run the... umm... dawg?

Of course!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google don't want you to have options and they want to skim your PDFs for their data gathering business...
 
So much for Google Chrome.

Re:Of course!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. It's like the OtherOS feature that Sony took away. Good bye Sony. The NSA is behind this. Global warming.

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.

Re:I'm OK with that...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Ugh. Chrome is dog-slow at viewing PDF's. If I had to use it on an older laptop it would be approaching physical pain to suffer with it. I use Sumatra - it is bare-bones and blazing fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumatra_PDF

"third-party programs"?

[themushroom]

bypassing any third-party programs such as Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader

Technically, Adobe Reader is the first-party program and Chrome is the third-party program for reading PDFs.

Re:"third-party programs"?

[Ksevio]

I think it means "third-party" in relation to Chrome, not PDFs

Re:"third-party programs"?

[djmurdoch]

No, the first party is the user, and the second party is the program the user is running.

Google is not proposing to force Adobe Reader to use Chrome.

Re:"third-party programs"?

[mysidia]

Technically, Adobe Reader is the first-party program and Chrome is the third-party program for reading PDFs.

Any document viewer outside the web browser; whether implemented as an executable program or a plugin module, is 3rd party software.

Chrome has an internal PDF viewer; and then there are 3rd party choices such as Foxit, Sumatra, or Adobe.

Personally I least-prefer Adobe's PDF reader, even though it used to be one of the most popular ones.

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:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I wonder how blazingly fast a 4MB OS is on 4GHz machine with GBs of RAM.

No matter. Adobe will find a way to bring the system to its knees.

Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[tgetzoya]

Try out a BlackBerry 10 OS based device, that's QNX.

Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[muridae]

Unless a userland process has a ton of OS level locks on the I/O devices (disk read/writes, managing it's own cache in files, other strange behavior) that all result in OS API calls. If the userland process does all of that, than the OS is going to grind along trying to manage all of the coder's stupidity.

Which probably explains both Adobe and the early JREs, in fact.

Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[LordLimecat]

process the entire OS

Im not sure what that combination of words means, and It surely does not follow from "being only 4MB".

I could write a LOT of 4MB programs that take a long time to "process".

Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[Lehk228]

Blackberry 10 is QNX, you are right it's very snappy and crashes exactly never

Re:hell, a complete OS os smaller than most PDFs

[hairyfeet]

Why don't you try kolibri and find out? I tried on an old junker Pentium D with a GB of RAM and I swear it was faster than either Win 7 or Ubuntu on a Phenom II X4.

Re:Data usage & Battery life

[WilliamGeorge]

I think you may have posted on the wrong thread - Google is not (yet) the government ;)

Sunnary unclear

[The MAZZTer]

1. It will NOT change the way the system handles PDF files.
2. It has NOTHING to do with how the browser views PDF files on the web (the Chrome PDF viewer is already the default).
3. It only affects how Chrome handles when you choose to open a downloaded PDF file.

Likely this was done to be consistent. Any security the Chrome PDF viewer could offer could be easily bypassed by an attacker forcing the file to download. If the user clicks it, it opens in the system PDF viewer.

I believe Adobe Reader has its own sandbox so this might seem a bit weird... but at least one thing Chrome has going for it that Reader has not is that Chrome is more likely to be up-to-date (I forget how Reader updates itself, if it does at all) AND it pulls the latest Chrome PDF plugin with it.

Re:Sunnary unclear

[swillden]

I believe Adobe Reader has its own sandbox so this might seem a bit weird... but at least one thing Chrome has going for it that Reader has not is that Chrome is more likely to be up-to-date

Not to mention the fact that the Adobe Reader has a long, rich history of serious security defects. The Chrome viewer has a big security advantage over Adobe Reader: It's not feature complete. Adobe has packed so many arcane capabilities into PDFs that it's a nightmare trying to support everything and keep it secure. The Chrome viewer doesn't do all that stuff that's hardly ever used in practice, so there are many classes of security vulnerabilities the dev team doesn't have to worry about. This means that occasionally a real, non-malicious PDF will require you to use a different reader, but I think that's a reasonable tradeoff.

So very much this.

[gweilo8888]

Seriously, I do not want Chrome's PDF renderer. It is ridiculously slow -- I can force a download of a PDF, get it pulled down, launch my own PDF reader and have it open in less than 1/4 the time it takes Chrome to download and render the PDF itself. It is also sorely lacking on features.

If this cannot be disabled, I for one will be removing Chrome from my machine, and I say that as somebody who has used it as my primary browser since it first came out. I am getting more and more fed up with the continuous feature creep and bloat in Chrome.

Re:So very much this.

[Zenin]

That's completely opposite of my experience.

On my not-so-hot computer I regularly open very complex, 400+ page PDFs (music scores mostly). We're talking 30MB w/o any imbedded images, just pure intensive processing instructions.

Chrome, from a total standstill (the process not even running yet), takes just slightly longer then it takes me to blink to start, load the PDF, and render. It's an order of magnitude faster in every way then every other PDF viewer I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.

It lacks features (PDF bookmarks, etc), but render speed is fantastic.

Re:So very much this.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Music scores don't tend to have the complex, MS Word driven document overformatting that is directly visible if you ever read the PDF.

Re:So very much this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tried Sumatra PDF? It's very fast and renders almost any PDF perfectly.

Re:So very much this.

[gweilo8888]

Well, I regularly (like, many times per day, every day, for my job) open many PDFs, almost all of which are extremely complex (hundreds of pages of graphically and textually rich user manuals, product spec sheets, etc.)

There is no comparison at all in my mind: Google's engine is slower than *any* PDF reader I have used in the last five years. And it's slow at the initial download, is the ridiculous thing. Download the exact same thing as a file in Chrome, it does it in a matter of seconds. Wait for it to download and render, and it takes multiple minutes. And I'm very conscious of this because the stuff I need is usually right near the end of the file, so the whole thing has to download before I can get to it.

Re:So very much this.

[Waccoon]

My guess is that hardware acceleration is working fine on your computer.

I recall all the hell I had to endure with my AMD video card and broken hardware acceleration, so I turned acceleration off completely. That made a hell of a difference with web browser speed.

Re:So very much this.

[Zenin]

Any chance you can offer a link to any of these particularly intensive PDFs?

I'm not discounting your experience, I just have yet to encounter anything like you're describing.

Re:So very much this.

[Zenin]

While I feel for your plight, the idea of running without hardware acceleration in 2013 is pretty uncommon. It's certainly nothing any sane person would bother optimizing for. We're optimistically talking about 0.1% of users. You'd effectively be optimizing for actually broken systems. That's like optimizing a car's high speed handling for cases where one tire is flat; The answer isn't to optimize for conditions of only 3 healthy tires...the answer is to change out the flat tire.

Re:So very much this.

[Waccoon]

Well, yeah, I had an AMD card. I've since replaced it with an nVidia and now I have no problems.

When I set a default

[msobkow]

When I set a default for a file extension in the OS, I expect the browser to respect that setting. Both Firefox and Chrome are now "bad apples" in the desktop configuration arena. Shame on them both. I see no reason why their implementation would be any more secure than the applications I've already chosen.

Re:When I set a default

[Dahan]

So when you click a link to a JPG file, does it open in the browser, or does it open in the viewer configured for .jpg in your OS? I'd wager that for just about everyone, it opens in the browser. What's different about PDFs that you think they shouldn't do the same?

Re:When I set a default

[swillden]

I see no reason why their implementation would be any more secure than the applications I've already chosen.

Well, if the app you've already chosen is Adobe's, you should look at the history of vulnerabilities on it and Chrome's viewer. You'll see reason.

Re:When I set a default

[swillden]

you should look at the history of vulnerabilities on it and Chrome's viewer. You'll see reason.

Wow.. that is such a dishonest comparison. Chromes viewer doesn't do all the stuff that Adobes viewer does.

That's by design. Chrome specifically excludes all of the rarely-used and hard-to-secure aspects of PDFs. That's a good thing. It doesn't prevent you from using Adobe for the rare cases where it's necessary, but it makes it much harder for compromises to be distributed via links to hacked PDFs.

Re:When I set a default

[swillden]

That's by design.

Then compare it to a PDF viewer that also does not implement those features.

Don't compare apples and oranges.

You're missing the point. What matters isn't what two things you compare, what matters is the security implications of the options available. Some other simplified PDF viewer that is more secure than Chrome's doesn't help if it's not the one that gets used. Google wants to improve the safety of Chrome users, and so they use the tools that they have to do that... and odds are very good that Chrome's PDF viewer has fewer security problems than whatever the default viewer on the user's system is (especially since it's probably Adobe Reader).

And for the savvy users who know what they're doing, they can always just change the default in Chrome and make it do what they want.

Security Issues with Foxit?

[jader3rd]

I've never heard of anyone having any security issues with Foxit. Plus, the top priority for Foxit is going to be a good PDF viewer, whereas that might not make top priority for a browser.

Re:Security Issues with Foxit?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/version_history.php

Re:Security Issues with Foxit?

[WaffleMonster]

I've never heard of anyone having any security issues with Foxit.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/security_bulletins.php

Re:Security Issues with Foxit?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I've always liked PDF Exchange viewer. Higher performance than Adobe, more free features (annotations) than Foxit.
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer

party in your pants

[themushroom]

And you're the only one who came.

Simple as that

[lesincompetent]

chrome://plugins/
Chrome PDF Viewer --> Disable.

Obligatory Zawinski's Law

[feufeu]

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Replace "mail" by "PDFs"...

But Try To Escape

[rueger]

I've been working on moving much of my on-line life out of the Googleverse. It has proved surprisingly difficult.

Today I was trying to lose Chrome, and go for another browser. I wasted about an hour and a half trying to sync Firefox between Android and my Mint Linux desktop, then gave up.

I tried Opera, which does install and sync with ease, and looks great, except that it refuses to display Google Calendar at all well.

What I'm finding is that Google has a lock on a lot of things that I use, that it can be difficult to replace many of them, and that the automagic Google integration is really something that I'll miss.

Re:But Try To Escape

[Zumbs]

Today I was trying to lose Chrome, and go for another browser. I wasted about an hour and a half trying to sync Firefox between Android and my Mint Linux desktop, then gave up.

Then stop wasting your time. Use the XMarks addon. It is able to sync bookmarks among a number of browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. It is also available on Android.

Re:But Try To Escape

[rueger]

Realistically no serious Google user is going to try and replace all of Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Reader (now defunct), Chrome, Search, Youtube, Android, (and whatever other Google tools that I'm not recalling) at the same time.

I like having stuff like contacts and calendar synced between my desktop and smartphone. Google does that really, really well.

I've moved my RSS feeds over to Tiny Tiny RSS, and like that model - I control it.
I want to eliminate Chrome next because (I thought) it would be easy to change over to Firefox or Opera, but that is proving somewhat more difficult than I expected.

Can I move my contact lists away from Google and still have them sync between desktop and phone? That may be the next project.

Or perhaps I'll look at how I can move my calendar out of Google. I don't know.

The point is that once you're used to that lovely Google integration of many essential functions, and the overall ease of spreading that over multiple devices, it can really hard to extricate yourself.

Probably be Google's design of course - they certainly have learned much from Apple's model.

And would I like to get away from Android? You bet. Even flashed Cyanogenmod a couple of times on my last phone. Sadly the smartphone equivalent to Mint Linux isn't quite here yet.

But when it does arrive I'll be ready.

(Note: the problem with add-ons like XMarks is that it becomes just one more thing that needs to be watched over or maintained. The other nice thing about staying with Google, or Apple, or even a major Linux distro is that stuff tends to just work, and do so reliably without a lot of fiddling.)

Google Makes Latest Chrome Build Open PDFs By Defa

[digitalPhant0m]

You bastards.

Not terribly concerned

[istartedi]

1. NotScript seems to be blocking all PDFs on my setup. I didn't get it for that; but that seems to be what it does by default. I'll have to look into it. 2. Google's in-browser PDF viewer is able to handle files that Adobe's can't. The Adobe viewer seems to have some kind of memory management issue. It thrashes my disk on files that Chrome handles just fine. When I have a PDF on the desktop, I drag it to the browser now instead of letting the default association kick in. 3. About that default association and the dragging. The fact that I can do that means that I still have choice.

Can I stop it following links?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

For some insane reason the pdf document thinks it is a web page and has tons and tons of stuff for javascript and hyperlinks etc etc. In fact the holes in pdf is on of the biggest vulnerabilities and if you strictly follow the standard, the same hole would exist in all the platforms. One of the main reasons for not using Adobe reader is to force it to stop following the links. Adobe for some reason resets all those security settings every time I am forced to upgrade Adobe viewer by some insane company policy.

Google stops Fox-it or it absorbs and assimilates Foxit I don't care. But I don't want Chrome to follow hyper links in any pdf document. Will it follow? Can I force it not to follow?

Re:Data usage & Battery life

[Curate]

Google is not the entire government, but they are certainly a branch.

Why are we even holding onto PDFs, anyways?

[rossdee]

We aren't, they are.

(RTFM has become RTFPDF - you don't get a paper manual these days for anything.

Re:use the force

[Baloroth]

Chrome will be forcing the system default for the filetype .pdf to become Chrome, not the user. And if you don't know how to make that not happen or change it when it does, as happens to most people...

That is decidedly not what is happening. TFA specifically states that Chrome, when it downloads the PDF, opens it itself, instead of handing it off to the system handler (i.e. the default application for filetype .pdf). In fact, Chrome is adding a menu option to open it with the default application if you want.

printing, yes. pdf is zipped printer language

[raymorris]

For transporting documents intended for print, or intended to look like standard size printed paper, off does a good job, and there's a reason for that.

For those unfamiliar with the history, Postscript is a popular language for computers to talk to printers. Windows, Mac and other computers could all speak Postscript. "Print preview" functions could also read the postscript commands to display a print-like view on screen. So if you wanted a platform independent document, you could just use those Postscript printer commands, zipped for smaller size. That's essentially what PDF is - a dump from a printer cable, zipped. There's no need for "select top tray" and similar printer commands that don't show on screen, so those aren't valid in pdf.

So yeah, pdf is good for printing because that's what the language was originally designed for.

* The above is of course a summary. Pedants can of course point out various changes from postscript to pdf.

meaning it could do _whatever_ to the whole system

[raymorris]

The point is, whatever operation you want the hardware to perform, it could do it to the whole system extremely quickly. Some examples:

At boot, it can load the entire system into RAM in under a second and never wait for a read from the flash drive again.

Next, it could download an update which replaces every file in the entire OS in less than 5 seconds.

A virus scan of the OS takes less than a second.

A complete backup takes less than a second.

Opening the web browser takes less than a millisecond (it was duly loaded into RAM during the 2 second boot .)

Searching the whole system for any files named "foo.lib" takes less than a second.

Chrome should launch IE to view html pages?

[raymorris]

If your default browser is IE, every time you click a link to an html page Chrome should launch IE, ignoring the fact that you've explicitly decided to use Chrome at the moment?

No? How about a jpeg, as Dahan said? Should Chrome display the image, or open Photoshop?

What's the difference between opening Adobe's software for jpegs and opening Adobe's software for pdfs?

Re:Xmarks - Syncs 200%, 400%, 800% better! (Blows)

[Zumbs]

I have used Xmarks for many years (from before browsers included sync capability), and I have never seen issues with duplicated folders. I never used RSS or similar features, so I would have missed the related issues. My experience is that Xmarks just works cross browsers and cross platforms.

Not a problem

[BlindRobin]

Ah doan lahk Chrom, ahtohl. Trahd it. Deent lahk it.

Re:Excellent

[Elbart]

Chrome is using Foxit's PDF-engine.

I've actually only used the Chrome PDF viewer 2x

[thejynxed]

Questions:

1) Does the viewer in Chrome lack all of the JS and other nonsense shoved into all of the "traditional" PDF programs (and yes, every other viewer developer is starting to throw this nonsense into their viewers, including Foxit & Sumatra)?

2) Will this change make it easier to just click on the PDF link in Chrome and have it automagically open in a new tab instead of me having to jump through hoops?

I ask this because the only two times I've used it were for a pair of device technical/warranty manuals which (USUALLY) don't come with any added cruft so I didn't notice anything in question 1.

Essentially, I just use PDFs for quick and dirty things like warranty/manual reading. I don't do forms or other corporate buzzword bingo nonsense in them.

Keep Your PC Safe from Rogue PDF Files

[iiiears]

http://www.maketecheasier.com/keep-your-pc-safe-from-rogue-pdf-files/

file associations, local unchanged

[raymorris]

Are you under the impression that Chrome changes the file associations? All they've done is treat PDF the same way browsers have always treated jpg - as content the browser is able to display natively.