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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

[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:adobe reader.

[Great Big Bird]

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

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.

"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

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

[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:Data usage & Battery life

[WilliamGeorge]

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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"...

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: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: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?

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.

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:Excellent

[Elbart]

Chrome is using Foxit's PDF-engine.

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.