Recently Firefox 19 Beta has been released with pdf.js, built-in PDF viewer enabled by default, since its not a plugin like to Chrome PDF Viewer that’s why this JavaScript based PDF Viewer is more secure. In fact you can set it as default PDF Reader on Windows to open and view PDF documents inline in the browser.
If you’re using Firefox 18 stable you can enable native PDF Viewer in it by turning “pdfjs.disabled” preference value in about:config to “false”.
Setting Firefox as default PDF reader
1. Find at least one PDF file in your hard drive (or you can download sample PDF file by searching on Google) select and right-click on it and select “open with”.
2. and use “Browse” button on open with dialog to navigate to Mozilla Firefox installed directory under Program Files and select “Firefox” application and click open.
3. Make sure “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is ticked at the bottom of open with dialog box, if not select it.
That’s it, from now onwards any PDF file will be opened by default in Firefox. You can see Firefox icon being showed on every PDF file which means Firefox has been set as the default handler for PDF files.
What’s your opinion on Firefox PDF Viewer? share with us in comments.
Hi,
Enabling the native PDF viewer did not work for me by setting pdfjs.disabled to false. FF 18.0.2. It’s still the Adobe Reader. Is there something else to do?
Thanks, Rim
Do this, after turning Pdfjs.disabled preference to false, open Firefox options>Applications tab>Select Portable document format (PDF) choose the action as Preview in Firefox, click Ok.
If that doesn’t helps disable Adobe Reader plugin in Firefox.
After that follow steps mentioned in the article to set it as default PDF Reader.
This has stopped working as of October 2018.