Firefox Community Forum

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.

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.

I just went to The IRS and filled out a pdf form to change my address and the print or font was in blue text I Want it it to always be in Black font text please let me know how to do it. I have font contrast and blacken as extensions. Do I need to do t in my windows 10 computer

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?

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.

When I select text in firefox's built in pdf viewer, a menu with comment and highlight options automatically pops up. I haven't been able to figure out any way to turn this off. This is a problem because when I'm using the viewer at work firefox now puts this menu exactly over the next piece of information I need. (eg blocks the next row in a process log)

I am using Firefox 153.0.4 (64-bit). Windows 11.

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.

I am no longer able to open in Mac Preview or save when hitting Command + P, then 'print using system dialog'. It will only print instead. For instance, I save certain web pages as PDFs using the print dialog and now it will only print when trying to use either the save or preview options. Command + P, print using system dialog, then I choose either save as PDF or open in Mac Preview, but as soon as I do one of these it will only print. I am able to use save in the drop-down list of printers, but I need to be able to open in Mac Preview.

I have my settings set to open PDF files in Adobe Acrobat, but the latest version of Firefox has started opening them in their own viewer, which is NOT near as useful, and I then have to download it to open in Acrobat like I used to do. Why? Is there any way to fix it back?

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.

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.

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?