This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

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 download links always prompt

  • 2 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
  • 14 views
  • Last reply by 2me.alan

more options

My current pdf behaviour is set to always open in firefox.

When clicking a link to a pdf, firefox will open it in browser (desired behavior) but when I click a pdf download link (even the one in the default firefox pdf viewer) it gives me a prompt asking if I want to save or download. In other cases like downloading a pdf from google drive, it will give me a prompt asking if I want to save open or open with firefox. My desired behavior for a download link is to just always download.

Since they are prompting me even though I've set it to open in firefox, the browser must be able to see a difference in the links but if I select download and select "do this automatically from now on" then it overrides my default behavior for normal pdf links and everything auto-downloads. Is there a way to set what happens in these cases? The extra prompt is just annoying and the last annoyance after switching from chrome recently

My current pdf behaviour is set to always open in firefox. When clicking a link to a pdf, firefox will open it in browser (desired behavior) but when I click a pdf download link (even the one in the default firefox pdf viewer) it gives me a prompt asking if I want to save or download. In other cases like downloading a pdf from google drive, it will give me a prompt asking if I want to save open or open with firefox. My desired behavior for a download link is to just always download. Since they are prompting me even though I've set it to open in firefox, the browser must be able to see a difference in the links but if I select download and select "do this automatically from now on" then it overrides my default behavior for normal pdf links and everything auto-downloads. Is there a way to set what happens in these cases? The extra prompt is just annoying and the last annoyance after switching from chrome recently

All Replies (2)

more options

Have you tried using right-click > Save As ?

more options

That's not really an option as far as I can tell but even if it was, it wouldn't solve the problem as I'm trying to decrease the number of steps when I am trying to download a pdf rather than view it.