Hey guys
Today I got so annyed by firefox’s default behaviour of downloading each and every PDF file to my disk that I went searching for a solution until I had the problem fixed. And it seems like I have finally found it. I have linked the solution but here is the fix in short:
- go to about:config
- change browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true
Thank you jscher2000 for the solution!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9785046
THANK YOU. This behavior has been bothering me since it was introduced but I thought there was no solution
After watching other comments I wonder why some people don’t get that this was a bug or at the very least, undocumented behavior outside of the Settings GUI. I had to deal many times with file (4).pdf on my Downloads dir. A BIG thank you, OP.
I know now why some people may not have this problem. It really depends on the server and if it marks the content-disposition header as attachment forcing the files to be downloaded. I edited my post now so that this is clear.
it isn’t in right in firefox’s settings -> general -> under ‘files and applications’ ??
‘open in firefox’ (what you want), vs ‘always ask’, ‘always save’ (download) or ‘open in default application’ (such as adobe reader). actions are configurable for many file types.
I believe even if you choose “Open in Firefox”, it will still download the PDF to the default download directory before opening it inside a Firefox tab. The behavior that OP describes above seems to prevent that downloading (and having the file around in your default download directory).
I don’t know whether they fixed it since, but last I checked that option was broken.
No matter what you select, half the time it still downloads the PDF to your drive.
It even says in the description that these settings determine how firefox will handle them after downloading them.
i have ‘open in firefox’ enabled on this pc for pdf. i never get a dl prompt. goes right to the internal pdf viewer every time.
It does not fix the bug, i want to save in tmp & use external application like it did until last year
I don’t want to have the same behaviour of chromium browsers, otherwise i would use chromium browsers.
Luckily microsoft updated ms edge on linux to save on tmp the files that you want to open, but you don’t want to save. It’s the only browser left that does that with a simple check in settings and doesn’t require big workarounds. Used to be only firefox to do this… pity
That sounds like browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir combined with “open with…”. That setting should download to tmp whenever you open it directly in an application. The other setting (browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline) should only be enabled if you want to open PDFs in the browser without downloading them.
Can’t you change that in the folder settings? Changing it to a temp folder?
Good on you for sharing! This behavior has been so infuriating to me
Iirc, I had to set that firefox doesn’t open everything in the browser but downloads the pdfs to disk. It was in the settings.
I really didn’t get the idea why I had to save pdfs manually. To me, it feels weird to not save pdfs automatically but I understand you if you rarely safe a pdf.
