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Comment by sp4rki | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand what the big deal is with PDF support. If I click on a PDF I'd rather it download to my computer and gets opened with the appropriate application, rather than using developer time in a feature that feels out of place within Chrome.

This feature has been available in the dev channel of Chrome for ages, and until now it's still unstable. PDF's tend big documents, and it's generally the case that Chrome locks up and ends up crashing when opening a PDF that's more than a few pages. This defeats the purpose in my opinion. The moment I notice I'm loading a PDF in Chrome I go ballistic trying to close the tab to avoid the crash.

I'd rather have developers improving the bookmark manager than trying to make a browser a PDF reader also. And a bad one at it. This makes me want to go back to the Chromium nightly builds. Those where awesome and bullshit free.

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It's quite a decent and neat feature if you have to read a lot of PDF's (i.e. academic paper hunting): you can quickly scan through the PDF opened in your browser and decide if you want to actually keep it. Otherwise the PDF will just be downloaded to your Download folder and then you have to read through them and clean up those unwanted.

That being said, I don't like Chrome's implementation though. Usually switch to Safari for "PDF mode".

" Otherwise the PDF will just be downloaded to your Download folder and then you have to read through them and clean up those unwanted."

No, not if you opt to have it opened directly in a PDF viewer.

Whether that's any faster than having the browser render it, I don't know. Except for larger files I doubt the difference is significant.

But in almost all cases I prefer to download the PDF and decide what to do with it later.

This. I moved back to Safari because with Chrome it's so painful to do paper hunting. It's much easier and fast to skim over and then decide which ones to save and read.

And additionally, when the paper opens in-browser, the location and browse history that got you to that paper is preserved. So when you're in the web browser and see the pdf of the paper by I.M. Smart and A. U. Thor, you can tell whether you got it from Smart's site, Thor's site, or somewhere else.

For people who are still using Acrobat Reader, this is a huge improvement since it doesn't involve Acrobat Reader. That's something.

> I really don't understand what the big deal is with PDF support.

Not everyone has a pdf viewer software installed.

This is where one of the few cases Chrome is aiming at cross-platform support at the cost of reusing native functionalities.

Every OS X and most Linux desktop distros are capable of rendering PDF natively. Personally I think OS X default PDF viewer renders much better than Chrome. They should just reuse it.

Similar thing for H.264 playback. AFAIK Chrome use ffmpeg to decode H.264 and WebM content. It's fine if there is no native codec to do that (H.264 on Linux, WebM on all OS). But on Windows 7 and OS X where hardware-accelerated H.264 playback comes by default, they should reuse that.

I have a fear that if they continue to do so (invent their own not-so-good stuff instead of reusing existing and better tech), one day Chrome will become the cross-platform shit that can run on every OS but not good on any one.

my hope is that they'll get it right and improve it on all platforms.

> AFAIK Chrome use ffmpeg to decode H.264 and WebM content.

Chromium use ffmpeg, Chrome use a proprietary library avcodec-52.dll

But almost all browsers have a PDF viewer plugin, and in general they're almost always terrible in some way or another. The problem is that PDF's are almost always very long documents, and a lot have embedded images, which results on the plugin crashing, the browser crashing, huge memory leaks, or at the very least decreased performance.

To be fair though, maybe I'm not the target market for this feature, but I find it way easier to just download the file and have it open in Preview, than to have to work with Chrome's implementation.

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