PDFs are everywhere Google considers PDFs as web pages and displays them in its search results. When you click on such result, Chrome will start loading PDF directly with it’s inbuilt PDF viewer. Chrome assumes that not everyone has a separate program for PDFs and it’s faster to render them internally. However, the internal PDF reader of Chrome lacks several features and many of us would not want to open PDF in Chrome.
The most common workaround is to save the loaded PDF in Chome to your computer and then right-click and use the option “Open with”. But this method will take another download and when better option is available.
Turn Off loading PDFs in Google Chrome
You can open PDF directly with your system client, which allows greater control on the document with a simple tweak: First, open a new tab in Chrome, type chrome://plugins into Omnibox, then hit Enter
Depending on how you use your browser, you may or may not see a lot of plugins on this page once you open it. Disregard everything else: what we are looking for is Chrome PDF Viewer, which should look like this:
Simply click “disable” to turned off PDF display. From now onward PDF files will no longer display in Chrome. That’s all! A simple tweak to stop displaying PDF in Chrome. Now, all PDFs will now open in your choice of client. In order to re-enable this feature, all that you need to do is follow same instructions again to find the plugin page and re-enable PDF Viewer.
