Stuff

Google Gview

I love rumors, and rumors with some bit of proof ? ….  that will be really cool ! … now, here is one for you. A blogger over here, found out that there is a hidden document viewer in Google Chrome, which can be enabled by adding –enable-viewer to the command line on your Chrome. Confused ? Wait,  I will tell you what it is.

How It Works

It works like the document viewer in Gmail. Remember those tiny links, asking you if you want to open documents in Google Docs ? ( spreadsheets, word files and PPTs ) … you click on them, and the document is there on another window for you, without downloading it, and without opening your MS Office program.

I hope you got this far. Now, imagine this, you found a PDF or PPT file online, a link on the website, somewhere … normally, you will need to download the file, and then open it .. right ? ( sometimes yes, pdf files do open in browser )   but with this cool feature, you can open it on your browser itself, perhaps, as a new tab … cool uh ?

What is Gview ?

Gview is a little secret that Google has kept inside their Google Docs thing, where you can view any PDF or PPT document online by putting it through Gview stuff, just like you embed a video from youtube etc. In other words, it makes documents “embeddable”. Well, it works on all browsers .. but for Chrome, it will be in built, … may be we will see something more to this very soon.

The document need not be hosted on Google Docs or anywhere on google. You can upload it anywhere, and just give the URL .

Don’t you think this is cool ?