chrome PDF viewer can't download file

Whenever you leave the website you used to create the object URL (window.URL.createObjectURL(...)) that very object will get garbage collected. So you need to keep a reference to that object somehow.

This works for us in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS Safari & Android to first display the PDF in capable browsers in a new tab and allow a download afterwards (in IE it just starts the download):

function openPdfInNewTab(url,
                         postData,
                         description = 'Document',
                         filename = description + '.pdf') {
  if (!window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob) {
    var tabWindow = window.open('', '_blank');
    var a = tabWindow.document.createElement('a');
    a.textContent = 'Loading ' + description + '..';
    tabWindow.document.body.appendChild(a);
    tabWindow.document.body.style.cursor = 'wait';
  } else {
    spinnerService.show('html5spinner');
  }

  $http.post(url, postData, {responseType: 'arraybuffer'})
    .then(function showDocument(response) {
      var file = new Blob([response.data], {type: 'application/pdf'});
      if (window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob) {
        spinnerService.hide('html5spinner');
        window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(file, filename);
      } else {
        tabWindow.document.body.style.cursor = 'auto';
        var url = a.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(file);
        a.click();
        a.download = filename;
      }
      $timeout(function revokeUrl() {
        window.URL.revokeObjectURL(url);
      }, 3600000);
    }, handleDownloadError);
}

We have been opening PDFs in a new browser-tab and had similar issues.

For us it started working again when we use window.URL.createObjectURL instead of tabWindow.URL.createObject which displayed the PDF but didn't allow the download.

Chrome's built in PDF viewer will download the pdf file through the PDF's origin URL. So if the PDF is generated at server runtime and if it's not stored in the sever, the download could fail.

see link here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/YxyVToLN8ho