3 Ways to Solve PDF Not Opening in Chrome Issue

Back in the day, if you wanted to read through a PDF online you had to download it and open it in Adobe PDF Reader or any other dedicated program. But now browsers can read PDFs by themselves and open them properly, and Google Chrome is one of those browsers. Still, this feature sometimes fails to pull through and thus the dreaded black screen appears. But there are some ways to fix this PDFs not opening or displaying correctly in Google Chrome issue. Here are the three ways to solve this problem.

1. Disable ‘Use hardware acceleration’

This first solution is quite an easy one. All you need to do is go to Settings in your Google Chrome browser, then access the Advanced Settings section. From there you can disable the ‘Use hardware acceleration feature’. Then close Chrome and open it again. Try to open the PDF now. Does it work? If yes, congratulations, you did it! If not, try one of these other fixes instead.

2. Check PDF-related settings

From the same Advanced Settings tab, go to Content Settings and click on PDF Documents. Is ‘Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome’ enabled? It shouldn’t be, because that means that it won’t open your PDFs in the browser and it will download them instead. Uncheck this option, then restart Chrome and see if anything changed.

3. Update Chrome

A lot of issues in Chrome are generally caused due to an outdated version of it running. So always make sure you have the latest version on your computer. If you’re not running the latest version, make sure to get on that and get yourself the updated Google Chrome. You will see better performances overall from your browser if you do this.