Summary

When you click a PDF link on a web page, your browser will try to open it for you as a web page.  USCIS forms and other PDFs require Adobe Reader or Acrobat in order to display values and run important calculations. 

We recommend installing the Adobe Reader extension for Chrome.  You will need to have Adobe Reader or Acrobat installed on your computer first.

Download the Adobe Reader Extension for Chrome

 
If using Chrome without the Adobe Extension:

When viewing PDF forms in Google Chrome, we recommend disabling the default PDF viewer in favor of Adobe Reader.

USCIS forms have some fields that do NOT display correctly in Google’s pdf viewer.   To avoid printing mistakes like unfilled check boxes, blank fields, and missing bar-codes, disable this plugin and set Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat as your default PDF viewer.

Once you have downloaded the pdf it appears in the lower left half of the screen as a downloaded file. If you click it, it will open in Google Chrome.

When you click on the little arrow icon next to the downloaded pdf file, you get a context menu with the following options:

  1. Open – displays it in Google Chrome.
  2. Always open files of this type – opens pdf documents automatically from that moment on.
  3. Open with system viewer – loads the file in the default program for pdf files.
  4. Show in folder – opens the folder the file has been saved to.

If you download pdfs occasionally, you can use the context menu to open it in your default program. If you do so regularly, you may not like the fact that Google has hijacked pdfs on your system.