A question for the Firefox users: How do I make Firefox on a PC use something other than Adobe Acrobat to read PDF files?<\/p>\n
Background: Opera is my browser of choice for web surfing, but I use Firefox for accessing GMail, Movable Type, and a few other sites that don’t play well with Opera, and Firefox is the only browser on the computer in the lab. It works very well, except for when I make the mistake of clicking on a link to a PDF.<\/p>\n
Firefox reads PDF’s through some sort of Acrobat plug-in, and Acrobat has one of those automatic update-checking things installed. When I click on a PDF file within the browser, it starts up, and if Acrobat is the least bit out of date, it hangs the browser up for several minutes at a time, and drags everything else on the computer down with it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“So, keep Acrobat updated, you non-updating jackass,” you say. Yeah, you might think that would be a good thing to do, but the updates are 1) huge files that take a long time to download, 2) released every two weeks or so, and 3) require me to quit and re-start the browser in order to work properly. If I regularly dealt with PDF files for work, I might be willing to deal with this, but it’s more hassle than I’m willing to go to for web surfing. On the exceedingly rare occasions when I encounter something important that won’t render properly without the very latest Acrobat update, I’ll go through the hassle, but I haven’t noticed any of the updates making a substantial improvement in the overall PDF-reading experience, so it’s not usually worth the bother.<\/p>\n
Off-line, my PDF reader of choice is FoxIt, which is small, fast, and doesn’t demand to be updated every two weeks. It renders 99+% of PDF’s perfectly well, but while I have it set as the default application for PDF’s on my regular computers, Firefox (and presumably Explorer, though I never use that) still uses Acrobat.<\/p>\n
So, what I’m looking for is a way to make Firefox use something to display PDF’s that doesn’t crash my computer. (Yes, I can right-click and save the PDF, then open it outside the browser. That would be a good solution if people would consistently label links to PDF files.) Acceptable alternatives would be a way to turn off the plug-in entirely, and automatically save PDF’s to disk (this is what Opera does), or a way to make Acrobat stop asking to be updated.<\/p>\n
Suggestions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A question for the Firefox users: How do I make Firefox on a PC use something other than Adobe Acrobat to read PDF files? Background: Opera is my browser of choice for web surfing, but I use Firefox for accessing GMail, Movable Type, and a few other sites that don’t play well with Opera, and… Continue reading Firefox Query: Dumping Acrobat<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}