View PDFs in Firefox 5
Jun 24, '11 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: alexiskai
To date, people who wanted to view downloaded PDFs on a Mac have had three options:
- Use Safari's in-line PDF viewer plug-in to view PDFs in Safari.
- Use Firefox v3 and the Firefox PDF plug-in for Mac to view PDFs in Firefox.
- Use a current version of Firefox, download the PDFs, and view them in a PDF reader app.
That's right -- there was no way to view PDFs in Firefox 4 or 5 as one could do in Safari, because the Firefox PDF plug-in didn't work above Firefox 3.6.
That is, it didn't officially work. But it turns out that with some simple modifications, you can get this plug-in to work just fine in Firefox 5 and probably future versions of Firefox, thus allowing you to view PDFs in the browser once again.
- With the Applications folder open in Finder, do a Get Info on Firefox.
- Check the box for 'Open in 32-bit mode.'
- If Firefox is currently open, quit and relaunch it.
- Download the Firefox PDF Plug-in for Mac (this is the beta 1.2 plug-in; the official 1.1.3 plug-in doesn't work with this procedure).
- When prompted, Save the downloaded file.
- You should get a file called fx-quartz-pdf-1.2.0.xpi in your Downloads folder. Double-click it to decompress it.
- Inside the resulting folder, you'll see 'install.rdf.' Open this file in TextEdit or vi or another simple text editor.
- Look for a line reading '<em:maxVersion>4.0.*</em:maxVersion>'.
- Change that 4 to 20. (Or you could change it to 5, but since Firefox is going to go through version numbers pretty quickly, you should pick one pretty far out.)
- Save and exit.
- Select all the files in the fx-quartz-pdf-1.2.0 folder, right-click on them, and select 'Compress 6 items.' Do NOT compress the containing folder or it won't work later on.
- Now you'll have a file called Archive.zip. Rename this file fx-quartz-pdf-1.2.0.xpi.
- In Firefox, go to the Tools menu and select Add-Ons.
- At the top of the window, look for the button with the gear icon. Click this and select 'Install Add-On from File.'
- Browse to and select the fx-quartz-pdf-1.2.0.xpi file you created.
- Approve the add-on installation when prompted.
Now this may work fine for some of you and you may be done. Test the add-on by attempting to open an online PDF. If it opens in the browser, great, you're done. But in my case, more work was required, because Firefox claimed that the add-on was installed, but it wasn't actually working. So I had to do some additional clean-up.
- Quit Firefox.
- Open ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[random_characters].default/extensions/.
- You should see a file called colesbury@gmail.com.xpi. It's the compressed file we created earlier, but with a different name. I think this is why it's not working. If you see a folder called colesbury@gmail.com instead, you have some other problem.
- Go up one level to the [gibberish].default folder. You should see a file called extensions.ini. Open this file in your text editor.
- Look for an entry that ends with colesbury@gmail.com.xpi.
- Remove the '.xpi' extension.
- Save and exit.
- Back in the extensions folder, double-click on colesbury@gmail.com.xpi. This should expand it into a folder named colesbury@gmail.com. If necessary, delete the previous .xpi file.
- Launch Firefox 5. It should properly display PDFs in the browser now.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]
Comments (39)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110622163401497