I’m a big fan of Google’s Chrome browser, but, as of version 8, Google’s shipping the browser with its own built-in PDF viewer enabled by default. But I like to read my PDFs in Acrobat outside of the browser. So, how do you disable Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer?

Type about:plugins in the address bar and hit Enter:

Once on the Plug-ins page, scroll down until you see Chrome PDF Viewer and select Disable:

That’s it! You’re all done. The only problem now, though, is that Chrome will warn you every time that you try to load a PDF that the file can harm your computer:

For now, it looks like there’s no way to disable this warning. And there are a lot of annoyed people.

A couple of days ago, Wired reported on the questionable use of Flash cookies revealed by a UC Berkley study. While non-novice Internet users are generally aware of cookies and their implications, fewer users are aware that Adobe’s popular Flash plugin stores its own cookies separately from normal browser cookies.

If you’re using Mozilla Firefox, you can use the BetterPrivacy add-on to automatically delete all of your Flash cookies each time you close your browser. You can also configure BetterPrivacy to delete the cookies every few minutes. Or to allow you to manually delete them using its interface.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, Chrome, or another browser, you can also use the Flash Settings Manager found here. It’s a good idea to browse through this anyway, as it contains some handy privacy settings (including the ability to disable Flask cookies entirely).

And, for Mac OS X, there’s Flush.app.

A lot of people got excited when Mozilla announced in 2007 that Firefox 3 would include a visual refresh focussing on system integration. Finally, Firefox would look like it belonged in Windows Vista. Sadly, that wasn’t the case, and Firefox today still looks like it belongs in the last decade.

Recently, a number of blogs have picked up these screenshots, showing mock-ups of the interface for Firefox 3.7. But what I found more interesting was the proposed interface evolution shown here:

After stopping off briefly at Firefox 3.7, the interface continues its evolution until it’s practically indistinguishable from Google Chrome.

I happen to love the Chrome interface, so, if accurate, this is nothing but good news. But it’ll be a long wait until Firefox 4.0. The question now is whether Google can add support for extensions to Chrome before Mozilla adds a modern interface to Firefox.