Chrome PDF Viewer not working because of Zotero Chrome extension

eva.diop
Hi,

Since I updated my Chrome browser, it won't open PDF's anymore. The PDF viewer still opens when clicking on a PDF link but fails to load a PDF file. The screen stays grey.

After some Googling, this issue might arise because of extensions https://silicophilic.com/chrome-pdf-viewer-not-working/. I found out that if I disabled the Zotero extension, the Chrome PDF viewer works properly. When I enable the extension, PDF's fail to load.

This is an annoying bug since I tend to use the Zotero connector when I'm reading PDF's in the browser. So turning it off in order to be able to read PDF's is not really an option.

Is this a known issue and is there a way to fix it from my part?

Thanks!
  • dstillman
    This isn't a general issue. No one else has reported it, and PDFs work fine in Chrome for me.

    Does this happen for any PDF, or only specific ones? E.g., can you view this PDF with Zotero enabled? If not, can you provide a Debug ID from the connector for loading that URL in a new tab?
  • eva.diop
    Thanks for the quick reply. It happens with any PDF and it also won't load the one you provided with the zotero extension enabled, the screen stays gray. Debug ID is: 835923887.
  • dstillman
    That's not a Debug ID. Follow the link for instructions.
  • dstillman
    But also, you have a lot of other extensions installed. If you disable all others, does it still fail with the Zotero Connector enabled and work with it disabled?

    If you uninstall and reinstall the connector, does it still happen?
  • eva.diop
    Turned out that it was indeed another extension causing the problem. Thanks for the help anyway!
  • josh.cofsky
    On a very similar note, the Zotero Connector extension (5.0.148) is now preventing Slack's PDF viewer from loading PDFs in Google Chrome (130.0.6723.92).

    Here is a debug log of me opening my Slack tab and clicking on a PDF file, which brings up an icon of a broken image: D1539978585

    If I turn off Zotero Connector, Slack opens PDFs no problem (I can't log this in the debug log because the log stops when you turn off the extension).
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