843760 - v19 PDF reader overriding chosen external reader

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[CEP]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20130215130331

Steps to reproduce:

Preset all PDFs to open using Foxit. This worked quite well in Firefox 18 and earlier (and specifically worked WITHOUT using the Foxit plugin... which will no longer install).


Actual results:

Upon upgrading (small download) to Firefox 19, PDFs now open inside browser (which is NOT ACCEPTABLE due to poor display quality, inability to select side-by-side display on landscape monitors, and lack of annotation tools provided by Foxit).


Expected results:

PDFs should have opened in Foxit. The Tools | Options | Applications entries for all permutations of PDF documents continue to show "open in Foxit 5.4." Manually resetting, then restarting, had no effect.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

does it work if you disable the built-in reader?

go to about:config, and search for the field 'pdfjs.disabled'  Set that to 'True'

Comment 2

[CEP]

Adds a bug and subtracts a bug.

When there is a directly link to the PDF (the URL ends in ".pdf"), pdfjs.disabled = true does send the PDF to Foxit.

But...

When the PDF is being served by any script, such as FoxWeb (US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals) or systems including the IRS, it's even more broken; now there's a channel failure and one cannot even download the PDF for later reading. Setting pdfjs.disabled = false allows the PDFs to be accessed again, but that's the basic bug.

There's another flag labelled pdfjs.firstrun (= false); should this one also be set to true? I'm hesitant to monkey with any parameter in the .firstrun class...

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The right way to disable pdf.js is not to use the pdfjs.disabled preference.
Set the right application in the options/applications UI for the Portable document Format entry.

This works as expected for me in Firefox19 and Firefox trunk.

Comment 4

[CEP]

Matti, that was my first attempt... and, as noted above, it did NOT work; the "built in" reader is ignoring my preference for Foxit.

I'm going to try something different: A full-download install of Firefox 19, instead of the automatic upgrade version. Thus, I'm not going to be able to check in on this for an hour or so...(In reply to Matthias Versen [:Matti] from comment #3)
> The right way to disable pdf.js is not to use the pdfjs.disabled preference.
> Set the right application in the options/applications UI for the Portable
> document Format entry.
> 
> This works as expected for me in Firefox19 and Firefox trunk.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Foxit as helper application or Foxit with the foxit npapi plugin ?
I tested only the helper application case.

Comment 6

[CEP]

(In reply to Matthias Versen [:Matti] from comment #5)
> Foxit as helper application or Foxit with the foxit npapi plugin ?
> I tested only the helper application case.

As noted above, NOT the plugin (I've always called it a "standalone application," as it also operates from the desktop and is not bound to another application).

And doing a full, 19mb install did NOT fix the problem.

Comment 7

[Loic]

Try to remove the file mimeType.rdf in your profile (make a backup copy before deleting it) and reset Foxit Reader as helper application to read PDF files.

Comment 8

[CEP]

(In reply to Loic from comment #7)
> Try to remove the file mimeType.rdf in your profile (make a backup copy
> before deleting it) and reset Foxit Reader as helper application to read PDF
> files.

Now this is getting weird.

Resetting mimeType.rdf seems to work on a Windows XP machine, but not on either of two Windows 7 machines (one 32-bit, one 64-bit). However, on the XP machine there is now a perceptible lag in opening Foxit that wasn't there before; that same lag seems to show up for another third-party PDF reader, but as I don't use that other one as often that's just anecdotal.

This makes me think there might be a stack-order problem buried in the compiled code somewhere... it's rather ironic that this bug first showed up when I was trying to obtain a new court opinion on software patents.

Comment 9

[Loic]

Make some tests with a new profile (don't import anything) so it would easy to know if it's an issue with your profile/Firefox or your external PDF reader.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

When the PDF is bad rendered in PDF Viewer, just download it via the download icon in the viewer, you should have the choice to select Foxit.

Comment 10

[CEP]

(In reply to Loic from comment #9)
> Make some tests with a new profile (don't import anything) so it would easy
> to know if it's an issue with your profile/Firefox or your external PDF
> reader.
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-
> firefox-profiles
> 
> When the PDF is bad rendered in PDF Viewer, just download it via the
> download icon in the viewer, you should have the choice to select Foxit.

In reverse order:
The download-and-open is not an acceptable solution when it is even available. As noted above, some other attempts to fix this problem have prevented all access to PDFs from some sources. (And frankly, EVERY PDF that I've seen has been badly rendered, on multiple machines with a variety of operating systems, monitors, etc.)

The "new profile" suggestion breaks so many other things that it took less than a minute to reject it as a solution. 

Bottom line:
This is quite apparently not a problem restricted to settings or profiles. This is a problem with the v19 code, whether due to a compiler artifact or something else.

Comment 11

[[:Aleksej]]

> The "new profile" suggestion breaks so many other things that it took less than a minute to reject it as a solution.

It’s not a solution, it’s a way to check if the problem is with the profile.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

circling around again to comment 11 and 9...

(In reply to Loic from comment #9)
> Make some tests with a new profile (don't import anything) so it would easy
> to know if it's an issue with your profile/Firefox or your external PDF
> reader.
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-
> firefox-profiles
> 
> When the PDF is bad rendered in PDF Viewer, just download it via the
> download icon in the viewer, you should have the choice to select Foxit.

Comment 13

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard