PDFs stopped opening in Firefox

jonschatz

I have the preference set to open PDFs in Firefox and have been using Zotero this way for several years. Suddenly as of yesterday, I'm getting the dialogue asking what to do with this file when I double click a reference or directly on a PDF file.

Looking in Firefox plugins, turns out Adobe Acrobat NPAPI Plug-in, Version 11.0.11 is disabled because it's "known to be vulnerable and should be updated." But nothing I try leads to a successful update. Using Firefox 48.0.2 on a MacBook Pro.

Any fix?

Thanks!

adamsmith

Tricky to tell you exactly what to do, but the place to look is
about:preferences#applications
and specifically everything having to do with Adobe or PDF

(to be clear: that's in Firefox. Zotero doesn't affect that setting)

dstillman

See also: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/file_handling_issues

DWL-SDCA

I'm in a Mac environment. I believe that the FF47 update changed my FF preferences so that (among other things) my preferences default applications were altered. Among the changes my PDF action was changed from "use Preview" to "save file". I said I believe" about FF 47 because I cfixed this problem before updating to 48 _and_ the update to FF48 definitely made that change to my preferences.

jonschatz

Thanks all for the replies. Problem still not fixed. Two observations:

-In seeking to delete mimetypes.rdf, I find on my hard drive there is no folder "Zotero" located at /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/

-Looking in Firefox prefernces#applications:
-There is a preference called "Portable Document Format (PDF)" which is set to "Preview in Firefox." However, just above it there is another preference labeled ""Portable Document Format" (i.e. without the "(PDF)") set to "always ask." For this latter, there is no option to choose "Preview in Firefox."

Any further thoughts?

Thanks again.

adamsmith

That does sound like deleting mimetypes would help.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data#w_how-do-i-find-my-profile will help you find the Firefox profile folder.

(though note that you didn't read the instructions correctly: if you're using Zotero for Firefox, you wouldn't see a Zotero folder in that filepath; you'd see a Firefox folder, which is what you're looking for)

jonschatz

Actually, now that I followed the correct instructions, deleting mime types DID fix the problem.

Thanks again!