Avatar for Username

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

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Is there a tag to disable firefox's horrible pdf viewer?

  • 3 replies
  • 10 have this problem
  • 15 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

jhawins
jhawins
more options

Hello,

As we all know, pdf.js is now implemented in firefox. I want to start by saying I think it WILL be a great thing.

While it WILL a great thing, right now it's absolutely horrid. We run a local paper (about 9,000 papers per week...) and post our issues online every week. When viewing our (and many other's) PDFs online in Safari, they look great. In Firefox however, it is absolute nonsense. Images don't render right leaving big blurry boxes instead. Type-faces are swapped around, spacing is off, things overlap and other problems.

I would like to know if there is any way (whether it be an html tag or some other method) of disabling all of our PDFs from ever opening in Firefox's built in viewer? Our audience will not realize that Firefox is making our hard work look like a scrambled mess and not us.


Any help would be great. Also, if there are some very minor tweaks we could use to make our PDFs render better in Firefox we would consider that. Although in all honesty that would be absolute bullshit, changing our methods to accommodate a plugin that should still be in alpha or beta stages.

Hello, As we all know, pdf.js is now implemented in firefox. I want to start by saying I think it WILL be a great thing. While it WILL a great thing, right now it's absolutely horrid. We run a local paper (about 9,000 papers per week...) and post our issues online every week. When viewing our (and many other's) PDFs online in Safari, they look great. In Firefox however, it is absolute nonsense. Images don't render right leaving big blurry boxes instead. Type-faces are swapped around, spacing is off, things overlap and other problems. I would like to know if there is any way (whether it be an html tag or some other method) of disabling all of our PDFs from ever opening in Firefox's built in viewer? Our audience will not realize that Firefox is making our hard work look like a scrambled mess and not us. Any help would be great. Also, if there are some very minor tweaks we could use to make our PDFs render better in Firefox we would consider that. Although in all honesty that would be absolute bullshit, changing our methods to accommodate a plugin that should still be in alpha or beta stages.

All Replies (3)

p4ntof3l
p4ntof3l
more options

If I understand correctly, the answer can be found here: How to disable the built-in PDF viewer and use another viewer

jhawins
jhawins Question owner
more options

In short, that is not what I'm talking about at all.

I myself know how to use another viewer, I mean, come on, I'm a web developer.

What I want is to be able to force other people's browser to not open the file in the built in viewer. Similar to how the Yahoo! Music Player uses tags to determine which files to open in the player and which to download.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

The integrated PDF Viewer only works for files send as MIME type "application/pdf".

For now you (until this bug is fixed) can consider this workaround and make use of Bug 738967 if you want to force another PDF viewer.

Using an embed tag seems Firefox making to use the Abode Reader plugin in Firefox and an object tag defaults to the built-in PDF Viewer if enabled.

  • Bug 738967 - pdf.js doesn't work for embedded PDFs
  • Bug 845740 - The web site should be able to suggest that Firefox not to use the built-in PDF viewer

(please do not comment in bug reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html) 

<embed src="http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040ez.pdf" type="application/pdf" height="100%" width="90%">

Modified by cor-el