James Stephens

The default behaviour of Mozilla/Firefox is to open PDF files within the browser. This post details how to change that behaviour so that they open in a separate application window.

The procedure is as follows:

1. First quit any running Mozilla/Firefox applications.
2. Remove the mozilla-acroread-plugin (as root) if it is installed:
   rpm -e mozilla-acroread-plugin

3. If it doesn’t already exist, copy the system plugger configuration to your local .mozilla directory:
   cp /etc/mozpluggerrc ~/.mozilla/

4. Edit your ~/.mozilla/mozpluggerrc file and comment out the lines pertaining to PDF files e.g.

   #ifdef([NO_ACROREAD],[
   #application/pdf: pdf: PDF file
   #application/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
   #text/pdf: pdf: PDF file
   #text/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
   #  repeat swallow(documentShell) fill: acroread -geometry \
       +9000+9000 +useFrontEndProgram "$file"
   #  repeat noisy swallow(Xpdf) fill: xpdf -g +9000+9000 "$file"
   #  repeat noisy swallow(gv) fill: gv -safer -quiet -antialias \
       -geometry +9000+9000 "$file"
   #])
   

5. Remove these two files:
   rm ~/.mozilla/appreg
rm ~/.mozilla/pluginreg.dat


6. Launch Mozilla and try to open a PDF file. You should see a window such as:

   

   Ensure that /usr/bin/acroread is the default application and that “Always perform this action …” is selected.

7. PDF files should now open in a separate window.

If you’d also like to open postscript files in a separate window please see this post.