Tip: Disable PDF Display in Firefox (Use Reader Instead)

Erik Bruchez on the XForms Everywhere blog walks through the steps necessary to make pdf files open in your dedicated pdf viewer instead of in Firefox. He also does a nice job summarizing why you’d want to do this:

• The Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin, like any Adobe application, takes ages to start. While it is starting, your browser is frozen and you can’t do anything else.

• When it doesn’t work, it crashes your entire browser, or just freezes it (the case with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 and Firefox).

• When it works, usual browser shortcuts don’t work, including those to close your window or tab, navigate between tabs, go back and forward, etc.

• To make things worse, there is really no reliable warning when you follow a hyperlink that you are going to open a PDF file. So you hang, crash or freeze without any courtesy notice.