Chrome, and other Chromium-based browsers, come with an integrated PDF viewer. This useful feature allows the user to avoid installing an extra PDF viewer app, providing essential functions, including the ability to print the PDF files. For files opened directly from a web site, there is a save button to download and save them locally.
You will need to set some other app to handle PDF files by default. Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:. If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support! Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in Kermit Matthews is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with more than a decade of experience writing technology guides.
He specializes in writing content about iPhones, Android devices, Microsoft Office and many other popular applications and devices. You must be logged in to post a comment. Step 1: Open the Google Chrome desktop browser.
When a Content-Type is not specified by the server and sometimes even when it is , the browser can perform what is known as sniffing to try to guess the type by reading the file and looking for patterns. Upon receiving a file with an inline or unspecified disposition, the browser needs to try to open it within the browser if possible.
To do this, it looks at the file type, and if it recognises the type it will try to open it. Since it's supposed to be the most generic type, denoting an arbitrary stream of bytes, there isn't supposed to be any handler that can apply to all files of this "type". Some websites have also used non-standard types. To see how PDFs are handled, we can delve a bit into web history. See, in the past, browsers had no idea what a PDF is. So they could not open it. Those were most generically known as plugins.
These plugins were capable of doing everything any other program could, and could additionally register themselves as a handler for a specific file type that might be otherwise unrecognised by the browser.
Incidentally, this was later found to be a huge security risk and support for these powerful plugins was gradually dropped Of course, after a number of security and performance issues caused by these plugins, the major browser vendors decided to incorporate their own PDF viewers while phasing out support for most plugins. There's actually still some leftover controls for this, e.
In the past, this would have allowed the choice between multiple plugins that registered that type. For example, the list of registered types for Flash:. Those days were also before a lot of the media support that came with HTML5. You would see plugins provided by media players like VLC or even Windows Media Player, or websites would embed a media player built in Flash. I found an explanation.
For security reasons, most browsers do not allow setting a custom default action for such resources, forcing the user to store it to disk to use it. This instructs the browser to download the file, rather than to open it directly. To modify file associations at any other time, however, you'll need to access the Default Programs menu -- it's in the Control Panel, though you can get there by searching for the word 'default' at the Start screen and selecting 'Default Programs' from the available options.
You can select 'Set Default Programs,' highlight 'Google Chrome' on the next screen and configure which files are opened with Chrome -- but you won't be able to manage file types that are not already associated with Chrome, like PDFs or audio files. Instead, select the option to 'Associate a File Type or Protocol with a Program' and add Chrome to those file types you want it to open. File associations on a Mac are modified using the file's icon and the 'Get Info' window.
Highlight the icon for a file with the extension you want to re-associate and press 'Command-I' on your keyboard. In the 'Get Info' window, expand the 'Open With' section and select a new application to use as the default for launching these types of files. Exit the window to save your changes.
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