1562177 - Infinite browser tab spawn when trying to view PDF

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218257

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Luke Tainton]

Attachment: Picture1.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Clicked a link that would normally download or open a PDF

Actual results:

Infinite browser tab spawn. I have to close the browser entirely to stop it.

Expected results:

A single tab showing a preview of the PDF file.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

If you get a "What should Firefox do with this file?" dialog and you choose to open with Firefox, that will create an infinite loop. That dialog is for external applications only, and you're not supposed to be able to pick Firefox there [1]. To do that safely, use the Open in Browser extension [2].

The only way to view PDFs in Firefox is to set the action to "Preview in Firefox" in about:preferences. However, servers can still trigger the "What should Firefox do with this file?" dialog, usually by sending the Content-Disposition: attachment header. One way to get around that is the Bypass Forced Download extension [3]. Less commonly, they can also fail to correctly identify the file type by sending Content-Type: application/octet-stream. Extensions like Header Editor can override that [4].

[1] Bug 218257
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-in-browser/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bypass-forced-download/
[4] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/header-editor/

Comment 2

[Luke Tainton]

I'm not getting this dialog - Firefox is instantly opening an infinite number of tabs.

Comment 3

[Luke Tainton]

I changed to Preview with Firefox and it's working now - thanks!