Sam Chandler, NitroPDF CEO, says that PDF Download 2 is scheduled to come out of beta Monday, July 21, and its significant new feature is the ability to save web pages as PDFs for offline viewing and archiving.

The plugin's nine million claimed users worldwide can do the reverse—convert PDF to HTML—already, similar to the way Google offers a quick web-page view of PDF files in its search results. NitroPDF says its servers are doing 30,000 PDF conversions daily from PDF Download users.

PDF Download users prefer HTML conversion of PDFs for many reasons, the most popular being that PDFs sometimes crash browsers or viewer utilities. They also, in some cases, take too long to open and navigate.

Swinging the other way—HTML to PDF—also is a quick way to share information from the web with a couple quick clicks.

"The ability to instantly capture web site content and email it to friends, colleagues or teams is important, for example," Chandler says. "The quality of the PDF itself is key, too. People need to know the PDF version of the web page is going to be good enough to share or archive. Our 2.0 beta program users have been raving about the quality of the PDFs produced by PDF Download."

Since there's no such thing as a free lunch, what's the benefit for NitroPDF, who foots the bill for development, support, and serving up the freeware plugin? Chandler says Nitro acquired PDF Download late last year in order to entice at least some of the possible 12 million Mozilla.org downloaders to purchase NitroPDF Professional, its Acrobat alternative and flagship product.

"It had a massive, passionate user base. It was consistently in the top 10 most popular downloads at Mozilla.org, and was officially recommended by Mozilla," says Chandler, who adds that another testament to its utility was that many of Nitro's staffers were already using it. "We saw the chance to build Nitro's visibility by supporting one of the greatest free PDF products on the web."

The plug-in's gotten some traction among the "Lifehacker" crowd, which espouses greater efficiency in the digital age, one little technological and organizational shortcut at a time. While these popular bloggers talk a lot about to-do lists, email, and calendar software, rarely does something to do with PDF capture their fancy.

"The Web community—bloggers in particular—have helped make PDF Download what it is today," Chandler says. "We find that users of free products are often really passionate about voicing their support in blogs, forums, and all over the social web...It always comes back to features, though—if you release something really cool, people will talk about it."