Does an error message display?

Some general suggestions:

When you have a problem with one particular site, a good "first thing to try" is clearing your Firefox cache and deleting your saved cookies for the site.

(1) Bypass Firefox's Cache

Use Command+Shift+r to reload the page fresh from the server.

Alternately, you also can clear Firefox's cache completely using:

"3-bar" menu button (or Firefox menu) > Preferences > Advanced

On the Network mini-tab > Cached Web Content : "Clear Now"

If you have a large hard drive, this might take a few minutes.

(2) Remove the site's cookies (save any pending work first). While viewing a page on the site:

• right-click and choose View Page Info > Security > "View Cookies"
• (menu bar) Tools > Page Info > Security > "View Cookies"

In the dialog that opens, you can remove the site's cookies individually.

Then try reloading the page. Does that help?

To rule out extensions as a possible culprit, could you try the site in Firefox's Safe Mode? That's a standard diagnostic tool to deactivate extensions, some advanced features, and some custom settings. More info: Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode.

You can restart Firefox in Safe Mode using either

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" button > Restart with Add-ons Disabled
• (menu bar) Help menu > Restart with Add-ons Disabled

Note: Flash and other plugins still run

After Firefox closes, a small dialog should appear: click "Start in Safe Mode" (not Reset)

Any difference?

thank you, jscher2000. yes, the little bar at the top of the window shows up saying that "this PDF document might not be displayed correctly" with the button on the right to use another viewer that doesn't do anything except close the little bar.

i tried all of your ideas: bypassing the cache, clearing the cache, removing cookies, safe mode. i still have the same problem.

on my laptop yesterday, everything worked fine while my desktop was broken. i checked the versions of firefox and my laptop hadn't upgraded yet. it was a couple of iterations behind. when i upgraded, the viewer stopped working on my laptop, too.

it seems as though firefox broke the pdf viewer that was otherwise working fine.

has no one else seen this problem?

thank you,

adam

Hi Adam, the bar with the error is displayed by Firefox's built-in PDF viewer. To switch to using the Adobe Acrobat plugin, see the steps in this article: View PDF files using Firefox’s built-in viewer. Does that revert your Firefox to its earlier behavior?

thanks for continuing to try; my option that looks like that is "use adobe acrobat npapi plug-in, version 11.0.7 (in firefox)."

when i select that, all i get is a blank screen when i try to open the document.

Getting a white screen with the Acrobat plugin on Mac is an old issue that I haven't heard about in recent years. Is that the latest version available? The safest way to check for updates to Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat is to open the stand-alone Adobe product and use Help > Check for Updates.

Does it work if you set the Portable Document Format handler to your system default reader, i.e., have that application open it completely outside Firefox instead of previewing in the browser first?

If that doesn't work either, it could be a problem connecting to the download. Can you tell whether the URL uses HTTPS? Firefox has become stricter in how it handles secure connections in the latest versions.

adobe reader is all updated. same problem.

i was finally able to get the browser to download a pdf and open it in preview, my default reader. but it's still not working on the particular, court-related website, it used to work on. the url is https.

which has created another problem on another site i frequent—i can't go back without getting a message about not keeping the site in the cache.

firefox used to be my go to for these specialized sites. chrome doesn't handle java well and it doesn't do the pdf viewer well. now firefox only seems to be good for the java site. this is unfortunately frustrating.

If the court site doesn't require a subscription/login, you could post a sample URL for a nonworking page. However, if it's not public, I may need you to check the Browser Console for error messages. You can open that window using Command_Shift+j, click the Clear button at the top to remove the clutter, then switch over to the court site window and try the PDF link again, then switch back to the console and look for any error messages. Firefox has made some changes in how it handles secure site certificates which is causing more of them to be treated as suspect, so I'm particularly on the lookout for that.

Regarding the Document Expired issue, apparently there was a change in Firefox 32 that is resulting in some pages not being cached when the cache is full. The temporary workaround is to empty your cache, but it will at some point fill up again. Some users have worked around the issue by changing from Firefox setting the cache size to setting their own cache size (this is on the same tab in the Preferences dialog as clearing the cache).

Or if this problem is on a search engine that has a choice in its settings between using GET (your search terms appear in the URL) and POST (your search terms do not appear in the URL), you can switch to GET to avoid the problem since it only affects POST requests.

thank you for your time; i didn't get any errors at all trying to use the adobe plugin. i just got nothing to show. this site has only ever worked using my default viewer in firefox "Preview in Firefox." when i set it back to that, i got these errors:

mutating the Prototype of an object will cause your code to run very slowly; instead create the object with the correct initial Prototype value using Object.create script-compiler.js:100 Use of Mutation Events is deprecated. Use MutationObserver instead. script-compiler.js:663 'setTimeout' called on an object that does not implement interface Window. script-compiler.js:668 "An error occurred while loading the PDF. PDF.js v1.0.473 (build: 1694cd8) Message: undefined" viewer.js:3266

i'm not sophisticated enough to know what any of it means, but it looks like a java issue might be involved?

on the document expired issue, i tried clearing the cache, overriding automatice cache management, and upping the limit. i'm still getting the problem.

I don't think it's Java -- Firefox has its own built-in JavaScript interpreter and compiler separate from the Java plugin. It's unfortunate that the names are so similar when they were never really related.

Do you want to try an updated PDF viewer to see whether this has been fixed? There are two ways to approach this:

(1) Install the "Development" version as an extension, which is more cutting edge but could have new bugs*; or

(2) Install the "Beta" version of Firefox 34, which is about half-way through its testing cycle and probably still has a few glitches with its new or revised features. https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/beta/all/

* There's a link to the Development version if you scroll down this page: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/ - please ignore the Stable Version link, Firefox 33 already has a newer version.

I think #1 probably is safer because it's easy to disable/remove an unwanted extension, while it is more work to install/reinstall Firefox.

On Document Expired, can you give me a sample website where it's happening?

it looks like things are working now; i installed the development version last week and installed the update that came out today. now my pdfs are working again and it looks like the cache issue is working right now, too.

thank you for your help.