Chrome tests Pepper-Free PDF Viewer, how to Enable

After flash, Chrome is scheduled to drop support for Pepper in June 2022, which PDF Viewer uses. That is why Google is desperate to move Chrome PDF Viewer to an alternate before then. Chromium team has started working on new process model for Pepper-free PDF Viewer. The change affects feature on Windows, Linux, Mac and Chrome OS

Chrome comes with builtin PDF Viewer on Desktop.

It is used to

View PDF documents,
Preview contents before printing (Print Preview)
embed PDF documents in Chrome OS applications

Chrome PDF Viewer to become pepper-free

Present PDF Viewer contains three major components.

. A browser extension encapsulating the web-based UI
The native C++ PDFium library providing PDF document support.
A Pepper Plugin bridging the gap between extension and PDFium

Pepper-free PDF Viewer

Chromium team has began work to replace Pepper Plugin API layer between Pepper Plugin and PDF Viewer extension with a pepper-free alternative.

Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer relies on a native plugin that uses the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI). Pepper is slated to be removed as part of the (P)NaCl deprecation and the end of support for Flash. We plan to migrate the PDF viewer plugin from a separate Pepper process into an ordinary renderer process, and to migrate all Pepper API calls to the renderer-native equivalents. This will unblock Pepper removal, and simplify the PDF viewer.

“Unseasoned PDF Viewer” document summary reads.

Enable Pepper-free PDF Viewer in Chrome

Ensure you’re using Chrome Canary 93.0.4571.0 or later

Visit chrome://flags/#pdf-unseasoned
Select Enabled and restart the browser

Soon you can test pepper-free PDF Viewer feature by enabling chrome://flags/#pdf-unseasoned in Canary version.

Its worth noting that the feature is a work in Progress.

Turning it on may break PDF Viewing in Chrome or render PDF differently without data. We’ll let you know when the feature starts working.