This is where one of the few cases Chrome is aiming at cross-platform support at the cost of reusing native functionalities.

Every OS X and most Linux desktop distros are capable of rendering PDF natively. Personally I think OS X default PDF viewer renders much better than Chrome. They should just reuse it.

Similar thing for H.264 playback. AFAIK Chrome use ffmpeg to decode H.264 and WebM content. It's fine if there is no native codec to do that (H.264 on Linux, WebM on all OS). But on Windows 7 and OS X where hardware-accelerated H.264 playback comes by default, they should reuse that.

I have a fear that if they continue to do so (invent their own not-so-good stuff instead of reusing existing and better tech), one day Chrome will become the cross-platform shit that can run on every OS but not good on any one.

> AFAIK Chrome use ffmpeg to decode H.264 and WebM content.

Chromium use ffmpeg, Chrome use a proprietary library avcodec-52.dll

my hope is that they'll get it right and improve it on all platforms.

But almost all browsers have a PDF viewer plugin, and in general they're almost always terrible in some way or another. The problem is that PDF's are almost always very long documents, and a lot have embedded images, which results on the plugin crashing, the browser crashing, huge memory leaks, or at the very least decreased performance.

To be fair though, maybe I'm not the target market for this feature, but I find it way easier to just download the file and have it open in Preview, than to have to work with Chrome's implementation.