Firefox uses its built-in PDF reader for locally stored files, no matter what is configured
Categories
(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect)
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(Reporter: Hartmut, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:92.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/92.0
Steps to reproduce:
Use File/Open to open a PDF which is stored on my local drive
Actual results:
Firefox uses it's built-in pdf reader, no matter what is configured.
Expected results:
Firefox should act as configured, e.g. ask, what to do (use external program, download, etc.)
If the pdf is stored on some web server, Firefox acts as expected. The bug happens only, when the file is stored locally.
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Comment 1•4 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::File Handling' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.
Hi Hartmut,
thank you for taking the time to submit this bug report. I was able to reproduce the issue on Windows 10, using Firefox Nightly 94.0a1 (2021-09-28)(64-bit) and Release 92.0.1 (64-bit) versions. As you described, Firefox uses it's built-in pdf reader, no matter what is configured.
Based on this I will mark respective flags as affected and set the severity.
I've assigned a component in order to get the dev team involved, but if it's not relevant,
'Firefox-PDF Viewer' team, please feel free to change the component if this is not the appropriate one.
Regards,
Jerónimo.
Hi Jerónimo, thanks for looking into it.
I did a few checks to find out, at which version this bug was introduced and came up with this:
Versions before and including Firefox 77.0 act as expected, they do ask, what to do, if this is configured.
Versions starting at and including Firefox 78.0b1 always use the built-in pdf reader, no matter what is configured.
After testing a bit more, I think I have simplified the situation a bit too much: Real situation is:
I have some Index.html-Files on my local drive which contain hyperlinks to PDF-Files on my local drive.
If I open that Index.html-File using File/Open in recent Firefox and click on the links, the PDF-Files are displayed using the built-in pdf reader, no matter what is configured. So, the behaviour is the same as described here, BUT: This bug came in during transition from Firefox 90.0 to Firefox 91.0b1. Earlier versions handle this correctly and ask, later versions always use the build-in reader.
I'm going to file a second bug and put in references for the other one on both sides.
Regards,
Hartmut
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1733362
Regards,
Hartmut
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Comment 5•4 years ago
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I am more convinced that this part should be wontfix. At the point where we need to decide how to handle the PDF file, we can't distinguish the "file > open" scenario from the one where you paste a link in the URL bar or pass it to Firefox from an external application. We need to open links from external apps inside Firefox, because if we follow user preferences and pass the link back to the OS we might end up in an infinite loop - plus, if the user opens a PDF with Firefox by double-clicking in their OS file handler, it's pretty clear that they want Firefox to just open it, not ask them what they want to do...
If you don't want PDFs to show inline in Firefox, disable PDF.js.
This was originally changed in bug 1633790, to fix the previous behaviour, which meant that if you had Firefox configured as your OS default handler for PDF files, you could get into infinite loops.
Description
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