How to Download PDFs Instead of Previewing Them in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge Apr 20, 2021, 8:30 am EDT | 1 min read When you click a PDF link in most browsers, the browser opens the PDF preview in a web browser window. To download a PDF and not preview it, you need to change a setting in your browser. This works in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Table of Contents Get Chrome to Download Instead of Preview a PDF Google Chrome uses its built-in PDF viewer to let you preview PDFs. You can turn this PDF viewer off, and Chrome will then prompt you to save your PDFs rather than preview them.