[rayiner]

We had built in PDF viewers in IE long before Chrome. In fact, it was even better because it was an OLE component, so IE could embed Adobe PDF, not the cut-rate alternative Chrome has. (Edge is even worse, it’s PDF viewer can’t even search large documents properly.) We have massively regressed on that front over the last 20 years.

[lordlimecat]

Embedding Adobe PDF was possible in Chrome and Firefox too. It was a terrible idea because generally you do not want full-blown Acrobat handling untrusted files from the web; for many years PDF + Flash were by far the top exploit vectors for malware.

Chrome's embedded PDF reader didnt support all of the extraneous crap Adobe did, but that's a feature. It was also sandboxed, which IE's implementation was not for many years.

[rayiner]

> Chrome's embedded PDF reader didnt support all of the extraneous crap Adobe did, but that's a feature. It was also sandboxed, which IE's implementation was not for many years.

It also doesn’t work very well. There are many PDF files, particularly those with OCR text, where search doesn’t work in Chrome but works fine in Acrobat. (It’s also slow to index files for searching, and lacks the UI to distinguish between a search failing because the file hasn’t been indexed and search failing because the text doesn’t exist.)

[acdha]

We regressed in terms of content features but have made enormous improvements in speed, reliability, and safety. Clicking on a PDF used to mean waiting a long time for Acrobat to load, clicking through various nags about updating because they were years late to the automatic-update party, and closing whatever things their marketing department were currently promoting.

[tptacek]

The IE PDF reader setup you're describing is extraordinarily dangerous.