How browsers support PDF viewing and which ones [closed]

Question

I use chrome and I can view PDF URLs in my browsers as PDF file. I would like to know if this is something that chrome natively supports or is it because of the adobe plugin?

I basically need to understand how browsers support PDF viewing and which ones do.

Reason that I'm asking this is I'm building a PDF gallery viewer. I looked into PDF.js, and apparently it's awesome because it converts PDF into native web format so that all browser support it. But from what I see all browsers already support viewing PDFs ( atleast the ones I could get my hands on ) so why is PDF.js awesome?

Answer 1

Chrome has its own native support for PDF (it doesn't require a separate plugin or Adobe Reader to be installed).

How Chrome supports PDF

Wikipedia notes that, as of June 2010, Chrome's built in PDF viewer is itself a plugin, running as native code via the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client#Pepper

You can confirm this by setting the Click To Play option for all plugins and then visiting a PDF document online. Note the PDF now only displays after you click the jigsaw piece to permit the plugin to run. The Click To Play option can be found in Chrome Settings>Show Advanced Settings>Privacy>Content Settings>Plug-ins.

Other browsers with built in PDF support

Firefox & the Mac version of Safari include built in PDF support. However Internet Explorer does not, so requires Adobe Reader to be installed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support