206304 - PDF handling does not honor preferences

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 19118

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[tlroche]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

When I followed a link to a PDF, my Moz 1.4a (on w2k) was opening it
in the browser using the installed Acrobat plugin. I wanted Moz to
launch the file in the installed Acrobat app instead, and not open it
in the browser. I thought Moz could be configured to do this, since I
had experienced this behavior with at least one past version of Moz or
Netscape (I forget which).

My Edit>Prefs>Navigator>Helper Applications>application/pdf was "Open
it using the default application".

<first objection>IMO, if you're gonna make plugin usage the default
behavior, the UI should indicate that, with, e.g., "Open it using the
installed plugin". To me, "open using the default app" means (at
least, in windows) "open the file using the application registered for
that file type."</first objection>

So I tried changing Edit>Prefs>Navigator>Helper
Applications>application/pdf to "Open it with" and point to the
AcroRd32.exe, but that did not change the behavior.

<second objection>That is really annoying: there should be _some_ UI
that allows the user to change this behavior.</second objection>

BTW, the annoyance is not merely mine. I posted
netscape.mozilla.user.general regarding this problem, and got this
response:

From: Till <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: how to open PDFs with app, not plugin?
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:31:03 +1000
Message-ID: <ba9f5f$[e-mail]>
> Annoying huh? Here's what I did. Rename the nppdf32.dll to
> nppdf32.dll.old in your plugins folder. You'll also find a copy of
> that file in your program files\acrobat\acrobat 5.0\acrobat\browser
> folder, do the same, rename it.

I exited Moz, did this, and restarted, and now Moz honors my
preference. But it should _not_ be necessary to hack the filesystem
just get this!


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Moz and Acrobat.

2. Verify Edit>Preferences>Navigator>Helper Applications>
   application/pdf == "Open it using the default application"

3. Follow a link or URL to a PDF.

Actual Results:  
The linked file opened using the installed plugin.

Expected Results:  
Open the linked file using the default application, or changed its
preferences UI to indicate that it would use the _plugin_ by default,
rather than the default _application_.

Comment 1

[tlroche]

"Expected Results:" is ungrammatical: it should read

> Either:

> * Open the linked file using the default application (not the plugin)

> * Have preferences UI discriminate between using the plugin and
>   using the application.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The current search order :

Internal Handled -> Plugins-> Helper Apps

You can see that you can't override a plugin with a helper app.
Please try this : open "about:config" (as URL) and change "Plugin.scan.Acrobot"
to "7.0". That should work until you install a Acrobat7 (And this will only work
if you don't have the plugin in Mozilla's plugin folder)

A UI for would be bug 19118

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19118 ***

Comment 3

[Michael Lefevre]

v