Origin story: Milestones, product updates

IronPDF was the first product Iron Software developed in 2015. Our founders recognized major market players Aspose, iText, and Syncfusion all had PDF products that were considered effective solutions, but we knew we could do better. This is why.

We started with a product that worked, but our team has been driving major improvements. Here we share how, what, and why those happened.

How we make decisions: Community driven development

Our product development strategy has always been to listen to our community. Here we focus on product milestones that demonstrate our commitment to increasing the performance of IronPDF.

Each of these updates was shipped between 2019 and 2022. Here we feature only select updates that are product milestones and demonstrate significant investment to improve the way IronPDF performs. For a more complete change log, you can visit this page.

Chrome Rendering Engine Release

• Update from: wkhtmltopdf
• Update to: Chrome
• Key benefit: Rendering
• Secondary benefits: Security, time-saving.
• Date shipped: 2021

This has been a game changer for IronPDF. In this update, we explain what the major drivers were for doing it and what you can expect to see as a result.

PDFium DOM Release

• Update from: PDFSharp
• Update to: PDFium DOM
• Key benefit: Damaged or corrupt PDFs can now be loaded and saved correctly.
• Secondary benefits: Compression, security, time-saving.
• Date shipped: 2022

In 2022, we replaced PDFSharp with PDFium. Learn more about what PDFium is and how we use it here.

Continually Expanding Compatibility

We know developers are natural problem solvers, and lack of compatibility creates problems. Many developers are skilled enough to build workarounds, but we wanted to save you the time.

• Key benefit: Increased compatibility
• Secondary benefits: Cloud Ready
• Date shipped: Ongoing

Increased Stability and Performance

• Updated: Chrome Embedded Framework compliance
• Key benefit: Greater user control resulting in improved performance
• Secondary benefits: Memory requirements reduced; stability increased; corrected error handling on Linux
• Date shipped: May 2023

Giving you more user control means you can reduce memory and increase speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did we build IronPDF?

We wanted a .NET PDF library built on the same rendering engine a browser uses, rather than a bespoke document object model. Two things follow from that choice: HTML renders in a PDF the way it renders on screen, and opening and re-saving a document does not risk breaking its structure. That is the problem our developers set out to solve, and it is why IronPDF builds on Chromium and PDFium — both covered in the answers below.

What is PDFium in relation to IronPDF?

To understand what PDFium is - it is a Google project which provides the PDF viewing and form filling interface for Chrome, macOS, Windows, and almost every piece of software other than Adobe Acrobat itself. It is the world's most developed and used PDF library, which we are proud to use, extend, and contribute to.

We build on top of PDFium (originally developed by Foxit), turning it from a view to a fully functional editor API that respects and adapts to the PDF standard as it evolves organically.

How does IronPDF work with Google technologies?

The PDF document format in itself is an art form, not a science. Although the PDF format is understandable, interpreting how it should best be displayed on a screen is different.

Google had thousands of engineering hours contributing to making sure PDFs looked perfect in Google products such as Chrome.

We take the latest in technology and add a layer on it to add functionality. All of that is developed in C++. We bridge those two worlds so .NET developers don't need to question the detail, because they can have peace of mind it will simply work. If issues ever do arise, we have a 24-hour support team.

IronPDF Milestones: Chrome Rendering | PDFium | Read Compatibility | Stability & Performance