240067 - USABILITY: Let the *user* control how to display PDF files

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 58554

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Matthias Heiler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Using the acrobat reader embedded within Mozilla under Linux is unreliable (see
plentora of bug reports), uncomfortable (less screen space for PDF's content)
and slow.  Besides, if I kill one embedded acroread, all others also die.

If I try to define an external PDF viewer in Preferences, Mozilla tells me:
"Mozilla can handle this type internally.  For such types, a Helper
Application will only be invoked if the server request external
handling."

In my opinion it's completely unacceptable that Mozilla claims to know better
than me, the user, how to display my PDF files. If the developers of Mozilla
prefer to view their PDFs embeddedly, fine.  Their choice.  But please let me
make my own choices.

Note that I already googled, found the workarounds which try to force Mozilla to
stop embedding acroread, but none worked for my und Linux.  (I'm not root on my
machine.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

related: bug 147309

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 58554 ***