Would opening a pdf via Chrome for example provide any extra protection? From what I understand most of the exploits are because of embedded media, no?
Extra protection as opposed to opening it in adobe reader, yes, much likely. Chrome has a sandbox for pdfs as far as I'm aware, they also provide a lot of big bug bounties to people who find any remote execution bugs in Chrome. So, in conclusion, yes, chrome provides relatively more security than other software when opening PDFs.
