This is fantastic news--mostly because of the sandboxing. Once burned, twice shy--I'm not allowing 3rd party plugins in my main browser any more. But I'm willing to trust Google to sandbox these features correctly. (Don't let me down, guys.)
Only problem is that now .doc/.ppt via extension is gone because I had to disable it to get plugin support. Need a rev of that extension to remove pdf support, and then we're saved!
Brilliant. The idea that loading a PDF won't cause a horrible browser freeze-up then require controls unrelated to the rest of the browsing experience is quite a lovely one.
I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' side of their business?
> I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' side of their business?
There's a way to answer that. What is their userbase like, and do they run Chrome? If the primary browser is still IE (and it kind of seems to me like 'easing PDF pain' is incongruous with people who have total understanding and control of their interaction with the internet) then scribd will be safe for... how long did it IE6 last? Probably about that long.
True, true. Perhaps Google can use this as a selling point to ordinary users? Though of course a large number of these are going to be using computers at work which usually means IE[6-8].
There are plugins both in Chrome and FF where any PDF links automatically opens it up using google docs. Much more faster smoother than native PDF loading. I just tried out this new integrated PDF on Chrome Dev channel (6.0437.1), and as mentioned it doesn't have all the PDF features, it loads PDFs on the left hand corner, instead of center. Much much faster though.
My experience has been that downloading + opening pdfs with a decent pdf viewer is much faster than google docs. I personally use evince, but probably anything other than acrobat would work.
Despite that I share the same experience as btmorex (my native PDF viewer is faster than any web viewer), there is also the additional problem that you need sometimes restricted access to the PDF. I often read journal papers and most of them can only be accessed from inside an University network -- i.e. Google cannot access them (or at least their web PDF reader is not able to load them).
The rendering quality is sub-standard compared to Safari on OS X at the moment, but I'm really excited there is another browser vendor trying to solve this problem!
I like this so far. On a few experiments it rendered pdfs well, very fast, and didn't feel nearly as clunky as reading a pdf in the browser usually does.
