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Firefox suddenly won't display PDFs in browser window.

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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For years, I've clicked on PDFs online and they've opened in a browser window. Then, if I wanted a copy, I downloaded it. Suddenly, this doesn't happen. It doesn't open, it just goes straight to download. I've changed no settings. Other browsers open the PDFs in question. What happened and how do I fix it. I'm running Firefox 78.0.2 (64-bit) on a 2017 iMac running 10.14.6. Thanks.

For years, I've clicked on PDFs online and they've opened in a browser window. Then, if I wanted a copy, I downloaded it. Suddenly, this doesn't happen. It doesn't open, it just goes straight to download. I've changed no settings. Other browsers open the PDFs in question. What happened and how do I fix it. I'm running Firefox 78.0.2 (64-bit) on a 2017 iMac running 10.14.6. Thanks.

Chosen solution

It sounds like maybe you have accidentally changed the default PDF program that Firefox uses. If you go to the Firefox settings page and scroll down to the Applications section, you should see the Portable Document Format (PDF) content type listed there. You can change the default action to Open in Firefox if you want Firefox to load the PDF instead of downloading it.

Hope this helps.

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Chosen Solution

It sounds like maybe you have accidentally changed the default PDF program that Firefox uses. If you go to the Firefox settings page and scroll down to the Applications section, you should see the Portable Document Format (PDF) content type listed there. You can change the default action to Open in Firefox if you want Firefox to load the PDF instead of downloading it.

Hope this helps.

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