Firefox Community Forum

Adding this post for SEO indexing purposes, as I cannot reply to the original archived one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1321170

The original post is one of the top search engine results, and provides a bandaid solution, without addressing the proper root cause, so I want to help whoever stumbles over this.

Original problem:

Dale 1/9/21, 8:26 AM

Firefox Developer Edition 85.0b4, macOS 10.15

If I Google for a PDF and click a link, I get the Firefox download dialog. If I select "Open with Firefox [Developer Edition]", the following things happen:

   The PDF is downloaded to ~/Downloads
   The PDF is opened in a new tab, with that new tab's location bar holding a file:///... URL to the downloaded PDF 

What I would instead like to happen is:

   The PDF is downloaded to some temporary directory where I won't have to worry about deleting it manually
   In whatever tab the PDF is displayed in, the location bar contains the URL where the PDF was (temporarily!) downloaded from 

How can I achieve this?

Not having the URL where a PDF was opened from is very annoying when, for example, I open a bunch of PDF search results to read and review, and I later want to share links to some of those PDFs. Best I can do to find their URLs to give to others is then to try and remember which tab corresponds to which search result, or do mine the downloads tab.

Contrast this with Chrome: I click a Google result for a PDF and the PDF just opens in the current tab with the URL to the PDF in the location bar. No dialogs, no PDF files hanging around in my home directory, and I can just copy the URL to the PDF the same way I'd copy the URL to any web page.

Thank you!

Proposed solution by original poster:

Dale Question owner 1/9/21, 9:27 AM Chosen Solution

Sigh. It appears the problem was one or both of the following preferences:

   pdfjs.enabledCache.state: false
   pdfjs.migrationVersion: 2 

I deleted both, and now clicking on a PDF just opens in the sane, normal way in Firefox that I desire.

Naturally I have no idea how those got set.

Trying to not just edit a PDF in Firefox on Linux but actually edit the document using its Dynamic-XFA format elements of that PDF. XFA is an Adobe proprietary format that they depreciated several years ago but it still works in Adobe Acrobat Free. (I use a Windows guest VM for this as a workaround for now but I'd rather not since it takes extra resources and time). Elements can be filled in FF and some menu drop downs work in FF but other dynamic XFA element buttons don't respond like the one I attached.

In Acrobat the "X" and "Add Contact" buttons will add or remove some elements to the document.

Can this be done in FF desktop?

Version 151.0.1 (64 bit) on desktop PC.

In about:config I know there are a lot of options to modify under the search term "pdfjs" but I don't know what element would allow this to possibly work if its supported.

I wish I had other better options but government documents are what they are.

When viewing a PDF in Firefox the URL bar indicates the file was downloaded to a temporary folder. If I then select "Save" from the PDF toolbar; or if I right click and select "Save page as" it opens a save dialog to the location I previously saved the same category of PDF to. For example I have separate folders for invoices, if the PDF is my electricity invoice it somehow knows and opens the electricity folder. If it is a water invoice, it automatically opens the water folder.

Whilst this is indeed quite handy, I do not understand how Firefox is doing this; nor do I understand whether this may be a privacy risk in some circumstances and should therefore be configurable.

Download Issues My downloads have stopped displaying. Each page of a download is now just a black screen. Any advice as to how I can restore them?

All pdf files show all pages blank. It affects both those newly downloaded in Firefox and those I have stored on my PC and open with Firefox. I think this started from when the latest Firefox update was installed this week. I am up to date on Widows 11.

I have Firefox set to always ask about how I want to open/save PDF files. Within the past couple weeks, I've encountered an issue with opening PDF files. When I click on a PDF and select "open with Firefox," the PDF opens in a new tab on Firefox, but it also opens in Acrobat. When I select this option, I just want the PDF to open in my browser, and I cannot find a way to stop it from simultaneously opening in Acrobat.

I have set the setting for PDF files to Always Ask. When I select the "Open in Firefox" option from the dialog, it opens the PDF in a new tab in Firefox and ALSO launches Adobe Acrobat and opens there. I have not seen this bizarre behavior before today. How do I fix it?

Editing a PDF is a great feature. Entering a text in Hebrew results in a PDF that, in some viewers (like your own) , the text disappears. When opening the file saved in Adobe Acrobat, it's fine.

When I try to open a pdf on a certain site I get the pdf, but there is an overlay of a pencil editing a ghost document. How can i get rid of this overlay? I've tried everything.

Firefox screws up showing .pdfs. The first view is fine but scrolling seems to overprint the first view without erasing it, if that makes sense, sorta like a double exposure. I can't get a screen cap either, which might just mean it's not a firefox issue at all, but I can view and screen cap .pdfs from any other application. I'm running Debian 12 up to date. When I need to view a .pdf I use Chromium, but I do prefer Firefox.

Whenever I open up PDFs within the Firefox browser, they have a black background and the text and images do not appear. I can copy the text and images out of the pdf and into a word document and it works out fine. Also opening it up on other applications works out fine. Attached is what happens when I open up a known working pdf in Firefox. The browser version is the current version, 135.0.

Firefox 136.0.1, Linux 6.8.0-55, have set Okular as default pdf application, however Firefox will not open pdf file when downloaded nor will it open the file when selecting Open File from the Download Icon on the toolbar. Only was I can get to file is to select Show in Folder option and open from within Dolphin.

I was having an issue with pdfs on firefox; all my pdfs were showing up as black. To fix that, I refreshed firefox, which solved the problem just fine. Unfortunately, once I did all my extensions stopped working. The page looks like this.

For most of my extensions, I can just solve this by getting rid of them and adding them again, but if I do that for onetab I'd lose all my stored tabs. How can I get this back?