Firefox Community Forum

I read Firefox's suggestion to use the browser to edit pdf's and thought I'd give it a try, thinking I might be able to use it instead of my old Adobe Acrobat editor.

But I immediately noticed that there's no way to draw a shape with the Firefox pdf editor - a circle for example. The Help says I can select shapes from the Draw menu but the only thing that appears on my Draw menu is a line (see the attachment).

What am I doing wrong?

Since this morning, Firefox previews any PDF I click on, and then I have to manually download it for it to open in Acrobat. Acrobat is set as my system default. I have tried other suggestions found here, such as going into the troubleshooting and checking the folder profile, but nothing works. It is very frustrating.

Since the update to Firefox a few days ago, I am no longer able to view PDFs in the browser. They still open, but they show up as blank pages. Is there a way to fix this or to revert back to the previous version of FF?

Thanks.

I'm filling out an appcation for a study permit in canada. My university website said that i should download adobe acrobat reader and use it to open the application pdf. I didn't want to pay for adobe, so i opened it with firefox instead. In the document, there are tab selections that it allows so you can select answers accurate to you and fill out the document. But at the top of the document it says I should enable javascript by going to preferences, then edit, and and then reopen the form. How can I enable javascript in firefox? I'm having difficulty finding the preferences and edit sections.

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'm begining to regret installing v146.0!

One of the most useful features of Firefox is the PDF editor and with this update, I've found that after annotating a PDF with several text boxes, clicking the text box icon (as shown in the attached screenshot) does absolutely nothing and it is impossible to enter any further text. The only way out of this is to refresh the pdf (after saving otherwise all changes will be lost) and then starting all over again only for the error to repeat itself making the editor almost unusable. Would really appreciate knowing how to work around this especially since to make my notes clearer, I change the color and the font size which is all lost everytime I have to refresh the PDF :-(

Incidentally, why are there so many updates? I prefer stable software that works rather than 'new features' that I never use!

Finally, Firefox used to have an amazing facility of making the Firefox private browser the default browser for Windows 10 but this was removed some years ago and can only be reinstated by changing registry keys. Everytime there's an update, these registry keys are overwritten :-(. Why was such a useful feature removed please?

Thanks in advance.

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?

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.

For the past YEAR or more, every time I choose to download a PDF (whether by saving a web page via file/print/save to PDF or by downloading an actual PDF via emailed link) my saved PDF has a padlock. I am forced to remove each padlock individually by adding 'users' under permissions. There is no way to do this for more than one file at a time.

This never used to happen in the past and I've made no changes to my PC or to my Firefox settings. I know it's a FF thing because if I save my own MS Word files to PDF there is no padlock.

Is there ANYTHING I can do to finally stop this and download PDFs without a padlock?

Thanks.

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.

Hi, I have few laminating machines icons on my computer face but I can't open them there is a message saying I can't open this file,

I think I have a Firefox PDF reader on my computer.

Thank you Bob Robertson

I use Xero accounting software and used to be able to view pdf within the software up until the recent update. Now it just sits with a spinning wheel. I've found that if I change the setting within Firefox to open the pdf within Firefox the issue is fixed in Xero. But then all pdf's open in Firefox instead of the usual Adobe. This breaks other workflows within my organisation as I need to email the pdf straight away when I download it, so my Windows was set with Adobe as the default for opening pdf's but now Firefox has taken that over. There does not appear to be any way to email the pdf from Firefox other than to save it and then find the file and email it from there which is very time consuming. I don't know what has changed in Firefox, but please can you fix it. I see I'm not the only person with this issue.

Recently, whenever I open saved (or sometimes new web) documents in Firefox, a very large pop-up on the lower right side of my screen appears with a cartoon of a pencil scanning a document. Below the cartoon it states "Now you can highlight your PDFs! With our new highlighter tool, you can read and edit PDFs in one place." The pop-up blocks half the view of the document and cannot be minimized or closed. It also prevents accessing (it hides) the "print" option if I want to print/save the page. I have WINDOWS 11 and have looked online for solutions to this problem which always produces the same suggestion: "go to 'settings', click 'privacy & security', check 'block pop-ups', click 'OK'", all of which I've done. I now limit my use of Firefox to streaming videos via amazon, and use Chrome or Edge for anything else I need to do, but I assume Firefox would not be happy to know of the aggravation their browser is causing, forcing users to go elsewhere (or am I the only person having this problem). Thank you in advance for any new suggestions.

Your browser needs immediate attention! I have windows 11. When I visit websites via Firefox and click on a link that takes me to a document, a large pop-up on the lower right side of the screen appears blocking half the page and preventing me from downloading or printing it. The pop-up depicts a cartoon-letter with a highlighter pen traversing its cartoon-text, below which is an enthusiastic missive stating (and I quote): "Now you can highlight your PDFs! With our new highlighter tool, you can read and edit PDFs in one place." Because of this infernal nuisance, I cannot print or download web pages. This has been going on for WEEKS! (That pop-up is USEFUL?! Who thinx up this stuff??!!) Apparently you're having trouble fixing this problem ... I understand--I'll just use Edge or Chrome from now on. Sorry if I woke you.

Hello Mozilla Support Team,

I have been using Firefox for a long time, and recently I upgraded my Windows system. Before the upgrade, I had set Firefox to open PDFs directly in a PDF Reader other than Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer, and it worked perfectly. However, after the upgrade, Firefox now shows the "Opening when completed" message and opens PDFs slowly, instead of opening them immediately in my chosen PDF Reader.

I have checked the settings, cleared the cache, refreshed Firefox, and even tested with other software, but the issue persists. The settings for handling PDFs are still the same, but they don't seem to work as they used to.

Can you please assist me in resolving this issue? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you