Popular PDF Reader from Adobe and built-in PDF Viewer in Microsoft Edge Legacy on Windows allows viewing two pages of a PDF side by side which could be useful on wider screens or Chromebooks where you can also use it to compare certain text or content in both pages. Chrome’s PDF Viewer doesn’t offer this option and Google is currently working to add ‘Two-Up view’ to it to its PDF Viewer on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
Classic Edge or Microsoft Edge legacy offers a Two Page Layout option for PDFs. To activate it, you need to click on the Page View toolbar option and select the Two-page icon or F8, after that by using the mouse wheel you can able to flip through pages horizontally. The experience may vary in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC where you need to visit View > Page Display to select Two Page View, here, Adobe Reader allows scrolling through the pages normally.
The Two-page format which resembles that of Book may make the large monitor users’ life easier, the reading may take less time and when a PDF is in a two-page view, users can read content as if they’re reading a book.
A bug has been filed in 2010 requesting to add a “two-up mode” option to Chrome native PDF Viewer to watch two PDF pages side by side. The Chromium team has started working on it in the last year, as of now, some progress has made where a flag has been added to Chrome 82 Canary named “PDF Two-up View” to enable the feature in PDF Viewer. The flag isn’t working now when turned on, expect it to work anytime soon.
Chrome’s PDF Viewer fills basic PDF needs where you can view PDFs in Chrome without installing third-party PDF Reader on your computer. Chrome’s PDF component with Fit Page option and Print support, lets you Zoom in/out document contents, you can also able to rotate PDFss clockwise/anticlockwise. You should expect a dual-view option for PDFs to appear either on the program toolbar or nearer to the Fit page and Zoom In/out buttons in PDF Viewer.
You should note that Chrome’s PDF Reader is based on an open-source PDFium engine. If Microsoft wants the feature in the new Edge PDF Viewer, it can port the two-page view from Edge Legacy easily.
Related articles:
Microsoft Chromium Edge is the new default PDF Reader in Windows 10
Comparison Between Firefox PDF Viewer (PDF.js) and Chrome PDF Viewer
Opera integrates Chrome PDF Viewer into the developer Stream