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 explanation in short:
Firefox determines what kind of file type it is based on the content-type header it receives from the server. Another header is the content-disposition header with which the server specifies how the file should be handled. The two most important options here are attachment and inline.
inline is the default if not otherwise specified, and means the browser will handle the file according to the behavior set in the browser settings.attachment means to always download the file
It is therefore possible that some pdf files are downloaded by force and others are handled according to the behavior specified in the settings. To force the latter in any case, you can proceed as follows:
- 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
Even with
browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inlineset tofalse(default), Firefox already opens PDFs instead of downloading them, thanks to this setting:For what use cases is that needed?
That option did not work for me
For me it still downloads and then opens it in firefox. In the description it clearly says: Choose how Firefox handles the files you download from the web (...). And I don't want it to download the file to my disk in the first place just store it in chache like a regular website.
it doesn't download them for me, unless I explicitly save the PDF that opens
like this example.
(akhtually it'll always download in order to open it, I just mean it doesn't create a PDF in the downloads directory)
Which firefox version are you on? I'm on 122.0b1 (flatpak beta) and changing these settings just defines what happens after I download the file. Also my download folder is set to ~/Downloads
121.0 stable, .deb from Firefox's ppa
interesting
Wait do you download the files to you /tmp dir? Or do you store the files in the browser cache?
my downloads dir is
~/downloads/but Firefox doesn't create a file there, so it must use a temp location for the PDF that opens.