A few months ago I complained about Firefox not being able to open PDFs without downloading them. Recently, I also wanted to start developing a custom Firefox addon to fix this behavior.

So what happened? I noticed that it didn’t happen on my work computer. Very strange…

I dug into the settings and found that on my work computer, Firefox was configured to open PDFs in Firefox, while on my home computer, it was configured to ask where to open them first. Changing it to “Open in Firefox” seems to work without downloading the PDF and saving it to the Downloads folder first. This was definitely not the case last year.

Searching online, I also found another hidden preference browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline. I guess it’s for when the HTTP response header Content-Disposition contains attachment. So if you enable it, it should also open those PDFs that are configured to be downloaded without downloading them.

Maybe the behavior changed when Firefox added the feature to open PDFs in the browser without downloading on Android?

At least I’m happy again. 😄

I’m honestly thinking about switching browsers, because this “new feature” where Firefox always downloads PDFs first to display them is annoying me so much. I don’t want my Downloads folder to be cluttered with all those random PDFs. If I open a restaurant’s menu PDF, I just want to take a quick look, but don’t want to have the PDF in my Downloads folder until I manually delete it and then delete it from the Recycle Bin again. There are some work-arounds, but no real solution.

I use Firefox as my preferred web browser both on PCs and my phone. One extension is always installed: uBlock Origin. The web is so much nicer with all the ads and tracking removed. But today I also retried an extension that will probably join the “must install” list: DarkReader. Especially when I’m browsing the web on my phone in the early morning, I don’t like to be blinded by white websites. Since March DarkReader has finally an option to detect if a website already has a dark theme and only apply it’s color changes to those who haven’t.

Nice, Firefox 93 got released. The big news is support for the AVIF image format, but Firefox finally has a datetime-local input implementation now!

The new Firefox design arrived. My first impression: The tab bar looks a bit weird, especially with just one tab open. But all in all it looks more modern and reminds me of the Firefox Android version. I think I like it. 🤔

Of course there will be many, many people crying about the new design and telling everyone, that they will stop using Firefox…