[SOLVED] [Firefox 19] How do I get Firefox to display local PDF files?
When I first installed Firefox 19, the PDF viewer worked so well that I uninstalled Adobe Reader. Today, after a system update, Firefox stopped displaying local PDFs. If I open a PDF directly from a website, the internal PDF viewer activates and the PDF is displayed properly. However, if I open a PDF from my hard drive, Firefox just displays a mass of jumbled characters and the internal PDF viewer does not activate.
Here is a screenshot of the behavior: http://i.imgur.com/5Of0kUH.png
I tried running in safe mode and the behavior persisted. I really hope there is a fix for this because using Firefox for viewing PDFs really makes my workflow much better.
EDIT -- SOLUTION IN REPLY
Modified by y9yjRQcg7F
Chosen solution
by y9yjRQcg7FSOLUTION
- In terminal, type: # firefox -ProfileManager
- Create new profile.
- Start with said profile.
- Fixed. Internal PDF viewer will now work in either profile.
Helpful replies
This can probably be fixed by deleting the mimeTypes.rdf file in the Firefox profile folder.
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/mimeTypes.rdf
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/File_types_and_download_actions#Resetting_download_actions
Additional System Details
Installed Plug-ins
- Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202
- Google Talk Plugin Video Accelerator version:0.1.44.23
- Google Talk Plugin Version: 3.10.2.0
Application
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
More Information
Chosen Solution
SOLUTION
- In terminal, type: # firefox -ProfileManager
- Create new profile.
- Start with said profile.
- Fixed. Internal PDF viewer will now work in either profile.
Modified by y9yjRQcg7F
This is relatively new. There will be issues, and I believe some bugs are scheduled to be fixed in later Firefox versions.
Problems of this type may conceivably only show on certain files. I have checked and I may open and view local pdfs in Firefox. (Using fx21.0a2 canonical on Ubuntu 12.04 )
Try a selection of files from different sources. If you use pdf s a lot the Firefox viewer alone may not suffice.
Not sure I understand that.
A new profile may fix a problem, but how/why does that fix the original profile.
Never mind, glad it works, & thanks for posting back.
Question owner
@John99:
This problem was very specific. I have hundreds of PDFs on my local hard drive. Firefox was behaving that way every single time I tried to open any and all PDFs from my hard drive. However, it never failed to open correctly when I was opening a PDF from a website.
Anyway, it seems bizarre to me that creating a new profile would fix the problem since I had tried safe mode, and it didn't work. Even more bizarre is the fact that going back to the old profile proves the problem is fixed there as well. I have no idea why this worked, I just know that it did.
Modified by y9yjRQcg7F
Helpful Reply
This can probably be fixed by deleting the mimeTypes.rdf file in the Firefox profile folder.