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If I view highly confidential PDF files in Firefox what happens to that content when I close the tab?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Suppose I'm reviewing financial documents in PDF from my broken in Firefox. They include highly sensitive personal information and when I'm done looking at them I want to close that PDF view tab and know the data's not hanging around in some temporary file store.

Other than purging my browsing history every time I do this, is there a setting for this?

Suppose I'm reviewing financial documents in PDF from my broken in Firefox. They include highly sensitive personal information and when I'm done looking at them I want to close that PDF view tab and know the data's not hanging around in some temporary file store. Other than purging my browsing history every time I do this, is there a setting for this?

Chosen solution

Best is probably to open such a document in a Private Browsing mode window to prevent storing this content in the disk cache or otherwise. If you need to use the "Open in Firefox" choice via a download dialog then Firefox downloads this document to the Widows temp folder and you get a file:// URI in the location bar.

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If you downloaded the file, or the file was already on your system, Nothing happens to it. If you viewed an on-line file, it is downloaded to a temporary folder. At some point, temporary files are removed from the system.

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Chosen Solution

Best is probably to open such a document in a Private Browsing mode window to prevent storing this content in the disk cache or otherwise. If you need to use the "Open in Firefox" choice via a download dialog then Firefox downloads this document to the Widows temp folder and you get a file:// URI in the location bar.