PDFs have always been one of my biggest computing nemesis: they slow my machine down to a crawl when opened and eat up a lot of disk space when saved. Gmail has just added a solution to address this: its own viewer that lets you view PDFs in your Web browser. It’s blazing fast, includes a search feature, and lets you download or print the PDF if you really need to.

The way it works is pretty simple. If you’re the recipient of a PDF, you’ll now get a “View” link along with the previously existing “Download” link. When clicked, the “View” link opens up a new tab, which promptly loads the PDF in Google Docs, without opening up any desktop software (ie – Adobe Reader). Other features of the viewer include options to zoom in and out, as well as quick paging via next/previous arrows.







As the recipient of a lot of PDF files, I’m pretty stoked about this addition to Gmail. On the other hand, it’s a bit of a blow to startups Scribd and Docstoc perhaps, who offer their own solutions for web-based PDF viewing.

Also, and I’ll assume this is just temporary and give Google the benefit of the doubt, but the new PDF viewer doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, but works perfectly in Chrome.

Update: The Gmail team says any issue I may have been having with Firefox is now fixed. I can confirm that this now works beautifully in Firefox too :)