How to open a PDF file in an ?

Using an iframe to “render” a PDF will not work on all browsers; it depends on how the browser handles PDF files. Some browsers (such as Firefox and Chrome) have a built-in PDF rendered which allows them to display the PDF inline where as some older browsers (perhaps older versions of IE attempt to download the file instead).

Instead, I recommend checking out PDFObject which is a Javascript library to embed PDFs in HTML files. It handles browser compatibility pretty well and will most likely work on IE8.

In your HTML, you could set up a div to display the PDFs:

<div id="pdfRenderer"></div>

Then, you can have Javascript code to embed a PDF in that div:

var pdf = new PDFObject({
  url: "https://something.com/HTC_One_XL_User_Guide.pdf",
  id: "pdfRendered",
  pdfOpenParams: {
    view: "FitH"
  }
}).embed("pdfRenderer");