Google-chrome – How to prevent Chrome from terminating on closing of the last opened tab

I get this a lot as well, but I fear that it's working "as intended".

From Google Chrome Help:

Closing the last tab in a window also automatically closes the window.

The comment in the question made me try something:

if you have multiple windows of Chrome open and you accidently kill one of them with your Ctrl+W-ing, you can restore the window by hitting Ctrl+Shift+T.

I haven't been able to test if this also works if you close all windows and have to launch Chrome again

The only way to stop the blank page is to use Right Click and Save Link As.

Since Chrome does not natively support an embedded PDF reader it assumes the PDF link is trying to open another page. It then let's the file system take over allowing your PDF reader to open the actual file. It doesn't have any facility to close the new tab that opened as it assumes it is being used for displaying the file.

However there is good news. You can use the Docs Preview Extension to preview all these documents in Chrome and it will stop this behaviour since the files will open in Chrome.

Newer versions of Chrome does support embedded PDF viewing so a lot of this answer is obsolete