We're calling on all EU-based Mozillians with iOS or iPadOS devices to help us monitor Apple’s new browser choice screens. Join the effort to hold Big Tech to account!

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

I use Mendeley Reference manager in Firefox. It used to work OK. Now I get a message "Firefox blocks extensions running on PDF files". This is just what Mendeley does. How do I get Firefox to allow this to happen again?

more options

I use Mendeley Reference manager in Firefox. It used to work OK. Now I get a message "Firefox blocks extensions running on PDF files". This is just what Mendeley does. How do I get Firefox to allow this to happen again?

I use Mendeley Reference manager in Firefox. It used to work OK. Now I get a message "Firefox blocks extensions running on PDF files". This is just what Mendeley does. How do I get Firefox to allow this to happen again?

All Replies (3)

more options

I did in fact contact Mendeley and the person helping me there in the chat did not have the same problem. I sent him the url and he sent me a video of being able to save the pdf to mendeley. He suggested that I add the url to trusted websites but that did no change. It seems to be a bug on the firefox end and not mendeley. Does anyone have any other suggestions???

This used to be a very useful add on for university students but has lost a great deal of it's function due to firefoxs "blanket ban"

more options

For a few years now, Firefox does not allow any add-ons to inject code into the built-in PDF Viewer -- it is a privileged page. For example, this prevents highlighters from working because they need to modify the page.

I don't have this add-on, but saving the entire PDF to an external program sounds like it should be possible because the add-on doesn't need to modify the page to re-download the file or grab its URL.

more options

I took a look at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mendeley-web-importer/

Are you trying to save a link/reference from within the text of the PDF? Unfortunately, that doesn't work.

As a somewhat clumsy workaround, you can save the PDF locally, then load it into this web-based viewer:

https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

That actually is the PDF viewer that forms the base of Firefox's built-in viewer. See the attached screenshot for reference on the load button.