PDF docs now open with Firefox instead of Adobe Reader?

Topic

New Reply

I am not sure if this belongs here, but I could not find any other forum. here, or elsewhere, that seemed applicable.

A few months ago (can’t remember exactly) Firefox suddenly became the application of choice to open PDF documents, instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader. I am curious as to why this is happening.  I can set Acrobat Reader as the app of choice, through the <Open with> item on a menu, but is there any way to default this back to Adobe Acrobat Reader (AR) for future documents, rather than having to do so on a “document by document” basis.

I am also curious why this change was made so that Firefox became the “go to app” for PDF documents.  Any thoughts, insight?

Ron M

Reply | Quote

Replies

In Adobe reader, make it your default for .PDF
In Preferences, on the General Tab under Applications – there is a choice to pick a default:

2 users thanked author for this post.

SueW, Elly

Reply | Quote

PKCano, thank you for your help with this.  It is appreciated.

Ron M

Reply | Quote

@ron-m What version of Firefox are you using?

 
Firefox 78: Set Firefox as the default PDF viewer on Windows
by Martin Brinkmann | June 03, 2020

 
Firefox’s installer does not associate PDF files with the browser, and that has been an intentional decision according to Mozilla.

The installer is responsible for registering support for default file associations on Windows. We’ve always intentionally left PDF out of that list, but that decision may be changing soon, so I’m moving this bug so that it can find its way into the installer team’s planning.

Mozilla does not reveal why it has made the decision, but announced plans to change the handling of PDF file associations in Firefox 78, at least on Windows 10.

If you run Firefox 78 already, e.g. as a Nightly, Beta or Developer edition, you may be able to set Firefox as the default PDF handler already, e.g. when downloading a PDF document to the local system.

 
Read the full article here

Reply | Quote

Kristy, thanks for the clarification and the reference.  The only thing that I know is that somewhere along the way in the last few months of Firefox updates, the default browser for PDF files was changed from Acrobat Reader to the Firefox browser.  I did not make this change as I wouldn’t have known how to do that at any time in the past, so I can only conclude that this change was effected by one of the updates to the browser.  Regardless, now that I know how to make any required changes in the future to ensure that Acrobat Reader is the default browser, thanks to PKCano,  I will be able to keep the Reader as the default browser regardless of what Mozilla/Firefox does.   🙂

Ron M

Reply | Quote