Edge to Get Adobe Acrobat PDF Engine

PDF documents are commonly used for many information documents online. The PDF standard is implemented across platforms and supported in many applications. On Windows systems, you can generate PDF documents using the Microsoft Print to PDF option, or using one of the many third-party solutions. For reading PDF documents, Microsoft uses its own PDF engine in its Edge browser. But this is about to change. A recent announcement shows that Microsoft is going to replace its own PDF engine in Edge with the Adobe Acrobat rendering engine.

My personal experience with third-party PDF documents is that there can be many deviations from the implementation. As a result, rendering these documents with the solution it was generated with works fine, but using a different rendering egine is not always working. A PDF document can sometimes not be loaded, or not all aspects of the document are visualized properly. Image-based PDFs are pretty straightforward, but since PDF can be a combination of bitmaps and vector information, a lot depends on how the PDF rendering deals with the postscript parts and font embedding.

The best result is often obtained with Adobe’s solutions for PDF. And since the Edge browser will only use the PDF rendering engine, and not any other application software from Adobe, things should improve.

The switch is a one-on-one replacement, that will remain free of cost. Deployment of the new Edge version with the Adobe PDF rendering engine is scheduled for March 2023. Corporate users still have the option to keep the current Microsoft PDF rendering engine until at least March 2024. This will allow them to test compatibility and ensure operations are unaffected by the change.

To get started with PDFs in your browser now, you can already use the Adobe Acrobar browser extension. It is available for both Edge and Chromium. These plugins allow you to use the free features af the Adobe Acrobat application. Included are viewing, printing, kimited editing, and form filling and signing.