[Firefox] Opening article in Zotero prompts the Firefox download dialog (Open with, Save, ...)

cschreib
Hello,

I know this was working correctly at first, but at some point the behavior of Zotero/Firefox changed and I don't know why, nor how to fix it back.

Basically, when I double-click on an article in Zotero, it used to directly open the PDF file. Now, it prompts me with Firefox's usual download dialog, offering me to either open the file with my PDF viewer, or save it to some place, etc, as if I clicked on a link to a PDF file in some regular webpage.

Do you know a way to avoid this dialog? Not only does it wastes my time, but it creates an empty tab for each article I open.

Thank you for your help,
Best regards.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/file_handling_issues
  • cschreib
    Thank you. I deleted the mimeTypes.rdf file in my profile, and Firefox generated a new one, but the problem persists.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    As far as I know that has always fixed this problem. Did you delete the file after closing Firefox?
  • aurimas
    Also, are you able to open any PDFs from the web within Firefox? E.g. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf
  • cschreib
    @ Dan: Yes I did. The new file is much smaller than the old one (3.8KB versus 19.6KB) and does not contain any reference to PDF mimetype.

    @ aurimas: I am not sure what you mean. Clicking on your link asks me what to do with the file, which is what I want. Opening any PDF file within Zotero does the same, which is useless.
    Maybe I should also add that I do not want to use Firefox's builtin PDF viewer because it is too slow and not reliable. I thus prefer to open PDF files in my native viewer (evince).

    I also tried to create a new profile and just copied the extension & zotero folders. This time Firefox is using the builtin viewer, and so does Zotero. Changing the preference in Firefox for PDF to "Always Ask" prompts the dialog for regular PDF files as expected, but also in Zotero. I guess this is an issue with Zotero. In the documentation linked in the second post, one can read:

    "For Zotero for Firefox, Zotero itself doesn't tell Firefox how to handle a file—it simply checks if a file can be handled within Firefox (natively or via a plugin) and then either sends it to Firefox if so or otherwise launches it via the OS."

    This does not appear to be true, or at least does not cover the "Always ask" situation.
  • aurimas
    See launchNonNativeFiles preference here https://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/hidden_preferences
  • cschreib
    Ah! That did the trick, thank you very much!
    The option 'extensions.zotero.launchNonNativeFiles' was set to 'false' (default), I just changed it to 'true'.

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