Google is always busy working on improvements to their browser, and apparently has 2 new features they’re planning to add to Chrome.
The main addition will be a new user interface for Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer. This new UI consolidates all of the PDF options into one area, making it easier and more intuitive to use. This may help convince third-party PDF viewer users to just use Chrome instead.
With the current version, the PDF name, number of pages, rotation options, print and download options are shown on the top toolbar, while the zoom options and fit to page option are shown on a sidebar on the bottom right. The new version will show all of these options on the top toolbar and it will always be visible rather than only on mouseover. While it will likely come to the stable version of Chrome in the near future, in order to try out this new PDF viewer UI now you’ll need to use Chrome Canary.
Once you are using Chrome Canary, you’ll be able to activate the new UI by opening a new tab and typing or copy and pasting “chrome://flags/#pdf-viewer-update” into the address bar and pressing Enter. After doing so the flag should be at the top of the page and highlighted. Click on the dropdown box and select Enabled. Now whenever you open a PDF file you should see it in the new viewer.
The other addition is a label that will appear to inform users of new options and features as they find them. These new features and options will have a small blue badge that says “New” on them. This badge feature also requires Chrome Canary and can be activated from the flags page, which you can get to by entering “chrome://flags/#enable-new-badge-on-menu-items” into the address bar.
These new features show that the Google Chrome team is committed to making Chrome a better browser, doing their best to make it user friendly and intuitive. The developers at Google are always competing with Firefox, Safari, Opera; and now Edge, with its recent improvements. Even with this competition Chrome continues to be the go-to browser for hundreds of millions of people across the globe thanks to the efforts of these developers.