Fast Web View relies on byteserving, a part of the HTTP protocol some PDF veterans might refer to as linearization. It's the document equivalent of streaming audio and video. Google Chrome, because of the way it handles plug-ins, doesn't support byteserving the same way other browsers do.

Basically, the Fast Web View setting allows a server to deliver a page of a PDF at a time to browsers who really only want to view one page—or jump around to several noncontiguous pages—of a long document and don't want to download or cache all the pages.

When Adobe introduced "Fast Web View" in Acrobat back in the early Pentium era of dial-up Internet connections, it was a godsend. It still is a heavily used feature, as document authors upload longer, richer, graphics-heavy PDFs that sometimes take several minutes to download.

Chrome users will probably notice slowdowns when viewing long PDFs, says Duff Johnson, CEO of Appligent Document Solutions, one of the first PDF experts to uncover the glitch. Even when Fast Web View is enabled in a document, Chrome forces users to download the whole thing before viewing it.

"Streaming permits large PDFs to display after downloading the first page, which greatly enhances the user experience," Johnson says. "If a high-quality user experience is a priority, Fast Web View is simply essential when serving PDFs larger than a few hundred KB. Most PDFs posted on websites qualify."

The Acrobat team also weighed in with a technical explanation of the glitch on its Shredding the Document blog. In an email to PDFzone, Adobe PDF standards architect Leonard Rosenthol says that the company is working with Google to correct the issue.

Rosenthol went on to say that Chrome also doesn't support several other PDF features that Firefox and Internet Explorer do, such as forms submission and online collaboration.

Google issued a Chrome upgrade earlier this week that patched a few known bugs. The company continues work on a Mac version, but the public only can access the Windows side as of yet.

While Johnson's excited to see another browser making its way into the world and believes that Chrome has a shot at unseating IE from its dominating market penetration—maybe even a better shot than Firefox, which only about 20% of people use—it doesn't offer significant improvement to the PDF experience.

"Chrome seems to work OK, we've seen no other complaints to date," Johnson says. "However, I don't see it as a leap forward for PDF viewing."