If you’ve liked Mozilla’s PDF.js, JavaScript powered PDF Viewer in Firefox-which shows PDFs inline in browser without need of any plugins- and want it in Google Chrome and Opera browsers through form of an extension, you can now have it.
Opera has recently ditched their JavaScript engine Presto and switched to Blink rendering engine and their new Opera Next 15 now based on Chromium. Opera Software has different ideas when coming to PDF Viewer instead of offering Chrome PDF Viewer plugin they’ve made PDF Viewer extension based on open sourced Mozilla’s PDF.js and is available for download from its Add-ons gallery.
You can know the comparison between Chrome and Firefox native PDF Readers from below link.
Comparison Between Firefox PDF Viewer (PDF.js) and Chrome PDF Viewer
Installing PDF.js PDF Viewer in Opera Next 15
1. Install the extension.
2. From then onwards, PDF files in Opera 15 will be loaded inline in browser directly using PDF.js.
Installing Mozilla’s PDF.js for Google Chrome
With a simple trick, we can now install the same Opera extension in Google Chrome also.
First, download PDF Viewer extension for Opera – right clicking on ‘Add to Opera button and selecting “Save linked content as” will do- make sure Windows to show file extensions by unchecking “hide extensions for known file types” in Folder Option dialog and now rename ‘nex’ extension in ’pdf-viewer-0.8.169-1.nex’ to ‘crx’.
Now drag and drop this extension onto Chrome://extensions page.
Update: As Alex said in the comment, PDF Viewer based on PDF.js is already available on Chrome web store, so the above process no longer necessary.
Here is the link for it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm