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

pdf files will not download -- get a blank new tab page

  • 1 cavab
  • 12 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

when using Firefox as my bowers, when i click on a site that has a pdf download like a bank statement, it will not download. shows a blank page called new tab.

when i use internet explorer, it works just fine.

when using Firefox as my bowers, when i click on a site that has a pdf download like a bank statement, it will not download. shows a blank page called new tab. when i use internet explorer, it works just fine.

All Replies (1)

more options

Current Firefox versions have enabled a built-in PDF Viewer that doesn't have all features that other PDF readers like the Adobe Reader have or may not function properly otherwise.

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.

See also:


Note that your System Details List shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize some prefs on each start of Firefox.

The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created it, so normally it wouldn't be there. you can check its content with a plain text editor if you didn't create this file yourself.

The user.js file is read each time you start Firefox and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.