Do you use Adobe Reader to read PDFs? Foxit? We've had various problems reported with them in recent weeks so some suggestions may be more relevant than others...

If you usually display PDFs in a Firefox tab, you could switch to having them download. In other words, you would get the Open/Save/Cancel dialog, and Open would launch your external PDF reader.

To experiment with this setting, go to:

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Options > Applications

In the search box on that tab, type pdf and pause while the list is filtered. You can use the drop-down control on the right to switch how Firefox handles PDFs.

Any luck?

I posted a reply earlier, but I don't see it here, so here goes again:

1. Thanks for the response!

2. No, I use Foxit Reader and have for a few years--almost exclusively.

3. I've always set it so that a .PDF link opens a Foxit Reader dialog and I normally choose to open the file before printing and/or saving it.

4. Today Foxit Reader notified me of an update, so I installed that hoping it might fix the problem, but no luck.

5. Since SOME bank sites still work, I'm thinking it must be something that changed in FF 13.0, when the trouble started, but I can't say for sure. As I mentioned I'm not having any problems with IE9 or Chrome--fortunately! But I really prefer Firefox overall and hope that the root cause of this is discovered soon. I use this function in my job (bookkeeper) constantly.

TIA for any more suggestions.

On #3, is that Firefox's "Always Ask" setting on the Applications tab noted above?

By the way, how do you usually access these PDFs: do you click a link directly to them, or do you click a link to a script page (e.g., file name in the URL ends with something other than .pdf)? Wonder if there's a pattern there.

I checked the Options, Applications dialog in FF and found 4 entries for .PDF files:

They all start with "Foxit PDF Document" and the four variations are:

(application/binary) (application/pdf) (application/x-download) (applicaion/(binary/octet/stream)

1,2 and 4 were notated "Use Foxit Reader 5.3, Best Reader for Everyday Use!" # 3 had "Always ask," which surprised me. I changed that to "Use..." and tried again, but no luck.

In response to your question about how I access these...there's always some kind of a hot link to a .PDF file. Some of them explicitly mention .PDF, some just say "Statement of XXXXX....blah, blah." Some sites, specifically Bank of America have a choice to view/print statements, or download statements. Clicking on View/Print will open a tab in the browser, but that tab usually lacks, or hides most of the Foxit Reader menu choices, which I like to have available, so I choose "Download." Most of the others respond nicely and just open the document in Foxit Reader.

It's kind of a mess since all these institutions have their own idea about how to best do their website.

(I won't even get into the complexities of using something like Lastpass to access 5-10 DIFFERENT accounts on the same bank's website....;-) I'll be happy if I can get Firefox behaving again!

Thanks for the help.

stp

I suggest changing all of them to "Always Ask." This should present the default Firefox Open/Save/Cancel dialog. Does it help?

By the way, some of those might be file types that aren't actually suitable for reading by Foxit, so I'm not sure why they've inserted themselves there.

Done--changed them all. No difference in behavior. Wells Fargo just shows a brief spinning wheel and stops. Citibank brings up the same Foxit dialog. I actually would prefer if it just opened the file, but I'm usually in "Just get the @#$@$# thing working mode these days ;-)!

Hopefully one of the Foxit users who frequents this forum will have some suggestions. Could I suggest, if it's still possible, editing the subject line on your original post to include "Foxit Reader" somewhere so it catches their attention?

Good idea--done. Thanks very much for your efforts!

I think I may have solved it. I checked my extensions and found one called "PDF Download" from Nitro PDF. Since I now use Foxit Reader almost exclusively, I disabled this one--just on the theory that it might be blocking proper functioning of Foxit PDF when clicking on PDF hot links in the websites. It seems to have solve the problem with the Wells Fargo sites. Hopefully all of them. I'll come back and mark this one SOLVED after I experiment some more.

Now to fix the problem with TRAPIT and it'll be all good again ;-)