Hey guys
Today I got so annyed by firefox’s default behaviour of downloading each and every PDF file to my disk that I went searching for a solution until I had the problem fixed. And it seems like I have finally found it. I have linked the solution but here is the fix in short:
- go to about:config
- change browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true
Thank you jscher2000 for the solution!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9785046
PDFs are particularly annoying like that. On one hand most browsers offer to open them in the browser, but on the other hand it’s a “file” rather than a document. Imagine if your browser decided to download all the HTML webpages that you visit to your download folder, instead of the temporary cache. That’s how PDFs are handled.
To make it more complicated, sometimes you’ll want that and other times you don’t.
It’s also really annoying in terms of GDPR compliance, because some users gather a lot of PDFs in their download folder without even realising it. I empty my download folder daily, just like the trashcan, just to be sure that I’m not keeping things that I’m not supposed to keep. This is only/mainly due to the browsers handling of the PDF format.