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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".

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" 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.

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