The Mozilla Forums have been talking about a weird Firefox 3 bug when trying to open an Adobe Acrobat PDF file within the browser window environment for some folks. I am one of those folks that is having a problem reading PDF files in Firefox. I feel like I’m hitting a brick wall on this one problem.
For some reason, when a pdf file is clicked on from the Web, Firefox 3 crashes and closes all windows abruptly and issues a crash report. This is also the case when trying to open a pdf file with the new Firefox 3 beta versions of the browser on my computer. However, the older Firefox 2.0 latest release runs fine and opens pdf files inside the browser window with no problems.
Some have said that this is no big deal, and just simply download the pdf files to your downloads folder, and then open it up with Acrobat Reader or some other PDF Reader program. I do have to say though, it is a big deal for me. I need to view PDF files regularly online, and I don’t want to clutter my downloads folder with pdf files that I don’t need. For example let’s take an online catalog that might have hundreds of individual parts sections, broken down by pdf file sections, that need to be quickly viewed to see which parts are the ones I am looking for online. If I have to download each section of the parts catalog before I know which one I really need, this can take much longer than simply clicking on the links and opening the pdf files in the browser window.
I have tried numerous things over the past month or two. I tried reloading Firefox 3, tried reloading Acrobat Reader 9, and tried disabling all the Firefox Add-ons with absolutely no success. I even tried going back to an older version of Acrobat Reader 8, but I still have the same exact problem with Firefox crashing and closing all the windows. In addition to all of those items, I also ran a registry cleaner program that fixes various problems with the computer software registries. None of this made any difference in the problem.
On top of this, I verified that PDF files will open in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, SeaMonkey, and Safari web browsers all work with pdf files on the computer.
There is one way I can get Firefox to open a PDF file, and that is through the IE Tab add-on. The Firefox IE Tab add-on mimics Internet Explorer so a person can open pages within Firefox as though they are Internet Explorer pages. Actually, this add-on is extremely useful for websites that require Internet Explorer to view properly or to edit the pages for an IE only editor. So, when I click the PDF file and open it in a new IE tab, the file is opened properly using the latest version of Firefox.
I am using Windows XP Professional 32-bit operating system software with 4 GB of RAM and Service Pack 3 installed. along with all the latest Windows XP software updates. Note that the memory is only addressable to approximately 3.37 GB of the total 4 GB RAM because of the Windows 32-bit OS software limitations. The processor is an AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core Processor operating at 2.50 GHz.
If anyone has any suggestions I’d appreciate it. Jim
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