How to Get PDFs to Open in Chrome Browser without Downloading?

Most web browsers are advanced enough to act as a file reader/viewer itself without add-ins or applications. However, not all users are aware of the fact, which rather puts them in complicated situations that are inconvenient to handle.
A similar condition was brought to us by a college student pursuing his master’s degree. This student, like most others, depended upon the web for resourceful course material and referred white papers and texts uploaded online as documents.
Scenario: The problem was that this student was having a hard time figuring out a way to open these documents without downloading them. There were particularly two reasons due to which he avoided downloading documents before going through them. Firstly, it was necessary to make sure that the material consisted of the required information. Secondly, unnecessarily downloading all documents caused trouble in data storage and management. Thus, the student was keen on knowing a way that would customize his Chrome browser to only open the documents and later let him choose whether to proceed with downloading them or not.

How to Get PDFs to Open in Chrome Browser?

Most web browsers are programmed by default to open Portable Document Formats for display and reading purpose. Later, the user is provided with a page change, zoom, print, and saving option on the document screen.
However, that is not the case with Google Chrome sometimes. Thus, the customization of this popular web browser needs to be done in certain cases to make it work that way. The student who came to SupportWare with a similar query was guided with the following instructions to make sure that PDFs are first opened on his Chrome browser without compulsion download.

Steps Make Chrome Display PDF before Downloading

Open a document web link on the browser. If the document isn’t displayed and rather starts downloading, Cancel it

Type ‘chrome://plugins’ (without quotes) in the address bar of your Chrome browser to open the Browser Plugin window.

See if you can spot ‘Chrome PDF Viewer’ named plugin. If you don’t; download it. However, if you do find the plugin, check whether it is ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’.

If the PDF Viewer plugin is found disabled, click on ‘Enable’ to make Chrome start using the plugin. This way, the browser will begin to display PDFs and not download automatically.

Once Enabled, the plugin will look like how it is shown below. You can also check ‘Always allowed to run’ option to make sure that at no given point do you encounter the same issue again.

Now open the same document link (or any other document web link) on the browser

You will notice that this time Google Chrome opens and displays the document on the browser window and does not begin downloading it. Below, you can see a number of options: enlarge the document page, change the pages back and forth, zoom in and zoom out, save the document, and print it directly from the browser.

This is how one can know how to get PDFs to open in Chrome browser without having to download them. Plugins are additional provision made by brands of the specific requirement to browsers and are thus, genuine to be used.