Join the Mozilla’s Test Days event from Dec 2–8 to test the new Firefox address bar on Firefox Beta 134 and get a chance to win Mozilla swag vouchers! 🎁

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

PDF viewer doesn't work in FF 36.0.4 for Mac

  • 6 respostas
  • 3 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by NivaR

more options

Macbook Pro with Yosemite and FF 36.0.4: Built in PDF viewer no longer works. Clicking on PDF links in search engines does not bring up the built in viewer.

Restoring FF 35 restores the PDF viewer.

Macbook Pro with Yosemite and FF 36.0.4: Built in PDF viewer no longer works. Clicking on PDF links in search engines does not bring up the built in viewer. Restoring FF 35 restores the PDF viewer.

All Replies (6)

more options

I understand that the PDF viewer in Firefox is no longer working. I have reset the application settings for the pdf file mimetype in the Firefox Application settings.

If the default continues not to work after resetting this setting, please check out a work around:

In order to change the default reader for PDF files (to not open PDF files with Firefox's internal PDF reader), follow these steps:

  1. Click the menu button New Fx Menu and click Options (Preferences for Linux and Mac).
  2. In the Options (Preferences for Linux and Mac) window, select the Applications panel.
  3. In the Search field, type PDF. You should find Portable Document Format (PDF).
  4. On the right hand side you should find an Action column. Use that to select your favorite PDF reader. In order to view PDF files in Firefox, choose Preview in Firefox.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!

Thank you.

more options

Hello,

I understand that I can install and select another PDF viewer - e.g. Acrobat or other to display the file in FF. I like the native PDF viewer because it is fast and doesn't have a lot of features that I don't need.

Will the native PDF viewer work in FF 36/Mac? I don't know why it would stop working just because of an update.

I run FF 36 on a Linux system and the native viewer works there.

more options

Right, is it possible to reset the pdf viewer or to download it one more time: *https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/

I can confirm that it works on another computer with the same set up. I would next recommend trying another profile:

more options

Thanks, I will just install Acrobat or some other viewer. I don't want to compile pdf.js from source. Too bad this valuable feature broke on the Mac FF update.

more options

Does Mac OS no longer have Preview as built-in PDF viewer?

more options

Ok... at the moment, PDF.js is working on my Mac with FF 36.

I updated to FF 36 from FF 35 again (fourth or fifth time)

First, what didn't work: 1) I installed Acrobat Reader 2) I set the NPAPI Acrobat plugin as the viewer within FF 3) This led to blank pages when clicking on PDF links and when opening PDF files from File --> Open

What worked: 1) Reselecting Preview (aka PDF.js) as the viewer 2) Going to Help --> Troubleshooting information --> Show Profile Folder in Finder 3) Exiting FF completely 4) Deleting the pluginreg.dat file 5) Restarting FF

I don't know why it worked this time. Maybe it had to do with temporarily changing the preference to another plugin-based viewer (NPAPI Acrobat) Maybe it was forcing the pluginreg.dat file to be recreated. Maybe both or neither.

For the moment, it is working and I hope it continues.

Thanks, very much for the suggestions.

NivaR modificouno o