Change PDF Viewer for Mozilla Firefox

Adobe PDF files are very popular over the internet as they are platform independent. Now that Firefox has added in-built support for viewing PDF files, when you click on a PDF file link on a webpage, Firefox opens it inside a new tab as a preview. But Firefox PDF viewer does not cover all types of PDF files. For example, some PDF files have interactive elements but Firefox does not support handling them. So if you want to open the PDF files in some other application (like Foxit Reader or Adobe Acrobat) instead of Firefox, then you can follow these simple instructions:

  1. Open Mozilla Firefox browser.
  2. Click on the orange colored Firefox button on the top-left corner and select Options → Options from the menu.

    Change PDF Viewer for Mozilla Firefox

  3. This would open the Options window. In this window, switch to the Applications tab.
  4. For the content-type Portable Document Format (PDF), click on the Action to select an action from Preview in Firefox, Always Ask, Save File or Use other... All these options are self explanatory.

    Change PDF Viewer for Mozilla Firefox

  5. If you want to select another application to open the PDF file, then select Use other… for the action. This would open Select Helper Application dialog where you can click on the Browse button to choose a third-party PDF viewer like Foxit PDF Reader.

    Change PDF Viewer for Mozilla Firefox

  6. Now you can click on the OK button to save the options. From now on, when you click on the PDF file links on webpages, they would be loaded in the PDF viewer that you have selected.