Did you read the replies in the thread you linked to and the article

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problems_printing_web_pages#Does_not_print_to_paper_at_all

I am not sure what you have done; but could you have you left the preferences in for the old printer and so Firefox is defaulting to printing to file, (those preferences will end print_to_filename) because there are no entries for the new printer.

See also

• Fix printing problems in Firefox
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Prefs.js_file

You could try resetting the print settings by resetting the pref print.print_printer
or you could follow the instructions in the above linked article and manually reset all printer preferences by editing prefs.js to delete all the print preferences. (Back it up first by copying it, and work with Firefox closed down)

I don't think printing is a strongpoint of Firefox.

I'm not surprised that you couldn't follow my original posting, since all the formatting info was stripped. I'm reposting to preserve formatting, adding my latest attempts.

I have just installed a new printer on my system. Firefox used the old printer name by default Following the advice in: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/762570#answer-114800

• I have printed a number of documents using the new printer (Firefox is supposed to remember the name of the last printer used) -- no change
• Reset the value field in about:config->print.print_printer -- the entire entry has disappeared and has not been restored after printing a document; also the default printer is not changed
• Abolished my old printer -- Firefox now defaults to a virtual printer, namely Cups-PDF
• Set the value field in print.save_print_settings to false -- Firefox still defaults to Cups-PDF

In addition since seeing john99's posting I have:

• Removed all fields containing 'user_pref("print.' from the prefs.jf file -- Firefox still defaults to Cups-PDF
• Removed all fields containing 'user_pref("printer_' from the prefs.jf file -- Firefox still defaults to Cups-PDF

The new printer, once selected, works perfectly. Other applications default to the new printer.

What's going on? How can I change the default printer to the value I want?

For added weirdness, immediately after selecting "Print" the default printer, "Cups-PDF" is greyed out, and the Print button is inactive. After selecting another printer, say "Print to File", "Cups-PDF" becomes active.

I had the same problem with cups-pdf being the default printer (even though it wasn't at server level) but it wasn't related only to Firefox but to each and every program that printed through CUPS, even KDE. I finally solved it opening the file ~/.cups/lpoptions and deleting the line that said "Default PDF". That's all!