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Firefox will not use Adobe Reader for viewing PDFs

  • 2 replies
  • 13 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by benlawson69

benlawson69
benlawson69
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No matter how many times I am forced to manually browse the Adobe folder and select "Acrobat Reader 11" as my default application to handle PDF documents, Firefox never keeps that setting. In addition, Adobe Reader is never even a choice in the "Open with..." Browse button. When I try to let it use Adobe Acrobat (I have the CS6 Master Collection installed) with a rendered PDF, it doesn't even launch the application. I know those may be separate issues, but they are both equally frustrating PDF errors.

No matter how many times I am forced to manually browse the Adobe folder and select "Acrobat Reader 11" as my default application to handle PDF documents, Firefox never keeps that setting. In addition, Adobe Reader is never even a choice in the "Open with..." Browse button. When I try to let it use Adobe Acrobat (I have the CS6 Master Collection installed) with a rendered PDF, it doesn't even launch the application. I know those may be separate issues, but they are both equally frustrating PDF errors.

All Replies (2)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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You can change the action for Portable Document Format (PDF) from Preview in Firefox to use another application like the Adobe Reader or set to Always Ask in "Firefox > Options/Preferences > Applications".

You can set the pdfjs.disabled pref to true on the about:config page to disable the build-in PDF viewer.

You can check the value of the plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types pref on the about:config page and remove the application/pdf part if present or reset the pref to the default via the right-click context menu.

benlawson69
benlawson69 Question owner
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My Options window claims that Firefox is set to use Acrobat Reader for PDFs (see the first screenshot), and I have already set the pdfjs.disabled value to true in about:config. After rebooting, it is still "forgetting" the setting like it did before. So whenever I try to view a rendered PDF it makes me jump through all the hoops again.

The second image shows me trying to view a bill from my cable company. It is rendered through a servlet on the server. You can see in the image that I have to browse rather than Acrobat Reader showing next to the Open with radio button. Then, when I click the Browse button, I get a list of applications that does not include Acrobat Reader.