How to pop up alert message when opening PDF in Chrome Browser using a JavaScript?

[#1]

Hi,

The company I work for puts out PDFs to a lot of customers, and there are some instances where customers are known to view the PDFs in an Internet browser, like Chrome. Unfortunately, because of Google not wanting to support the in-browser PDF viewer, some problems have manifested—mainly the weird way it now handles hyperlinks in PDFs, where it treats them as annotations and forces clunky big yellow boxes to appear when the user's mouse hovers over the links.

I have tried unsuccessfully to see if I could produce a JavaScript added to the PDF to hide the newly-generated "annotations," but that doesn't appear to work. I suspect the fact that these aren't really annotations but are being treated "as if" they were by the Chrome viewer is part of the problem.

I would now like to see if there is a way, using a Document-level JavaScript added to the PDF, to put up an alert message when the user opens it in Chrome. I have found a way to tell if the user is viewing the PDF in *anything* other than Acrobat (using this.external), but we're not having the same issue with any other browsers. Is there any way to be make the script specifically detect the use of Chrome?

Thank you!

[#2]

Hi,

The company I work for puts out PDFs to a lot of customers, and there are some instances where customers are known to view the PDFs in an Internet browser, like Chrome. Unfortunately, because of Google not wanting to support the in-browser PDF viewer, some problems have manifested—mainly the weird way it now handles hyperlinks in PDFs, where it treats them as annotations and forces clunky big yellow boxes to appear when the user's mouse hovers over the links.

I have tried unsuccessfully to see if I could produce a JavaScript added to the PDF to hide the newly-generated "annotations," but that doesn't appear to work. I suspect the fact that these aren't really annotations but are being treated "as if" they were by the Chrome viewer is part of the problem.

I would now like to see if there is a way, using a Document-level JavaScript added to the PDF, to put up an alert message when the user opens it in Chrome. I have found a way to tell if the user is viewing the PDF in *anything* other than Acrobat (using this.external), but we're not having the same issue with any other browsers. Is there any way to be make the script specifically detect the use of Chrome?

Thank you!

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Yes. Have a look at the viewerType property of the app object.

[#4]

Thank you so much! That works. Testing for app.viewerType of "pdfium" gets it done.