Over the years, Chrome has provided immense convenience with its ability to open and view PDFs. And with its recent move away from Adobe’s NPAPI plugin to an in-house PDF viewer, the browser now provides an even better experience in terms of both performance and security.
However, things are far from perfect, and you may encounter random problems ranging from auto-downloading PDFs and improperly loading content to scrolling issues.
Fortunately, you don’t have to suffer through these annoyances or worst, switch browsers. Mostly, they stem due to some really trivial reasons, and there are a number of ways to troubleshoot them.
CHROME DOWNLOADS PDF INSTEAD OF OPENING
The most prevalent issue with Chrome’s PDF viewer occurs when it downloads PDFs automatically, which can be pretty annoying if you prefer previewing documents prior to saving them locally. However, it doesn’t take long to get the problem fixed, so let’s see how.
Disable PDF Downloads
Chrome has a built-in setting that forcibly downloads PDFs instead of opening them. While this setting is usually disabled by default, you may have accidentally turned it on, or perhaps a third-party add-on modified it instead. To check if this is the case, you need to dive into the Chrome Advanced Settings panel.
Step 1: Open the Chrome menu, and then click Settings.
Step 2: Scroll down, and then click Advanced.
Step 3: Under the Privacy and Security section, click Content Settings.
Step 4: Scroll down, and then click PDF Documents.
Step 5: If turned on, disable the switch next to Download PDF Files Instead of Automatically Opening Them in Chrome.
That’s it. PDFs should now display within Chrome instead of downloading automatically.
However, Certain PDFs Would Still Download …
Rarely, you may find certain PDFs downloading automatically even if Chrome is configured otherwise. The reason lies when such PDFs are actually instructed from the server-side to download to your hard drive rather than open in-browser.
In developer lingo, this happens if the URL hosting the PDF has its Content-Disposition header set to ‘Attachment,’ indicating that it’s hellbent on downloading no matter what.
Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about this. There was an add-on in the Chrome Web Store that supposedly stopped these PDFs from downloading forcibly, but it no longer works.
