Mozilla and PDFs

Every time you open a link with Mozilla which points to a PDF file Adobe Acrobat will be started inside Mozilla. Often it doesn't shutdown completely after you closed the page in your browser. The plaintive side-effect of this is that a lot of Memory is allocated to the Acrobat PDF Reader even you don't use it anymore.

This page explains a possible solution to work around this problem. With this in place you can also define to use another Appication to open you PDF files. For instance I use FoxitPDF Reader because it is a lot quicker than Adobe Acrobat Reader therefore it dosn't support all PDF features.

If you find a mistake or have suggestions for improvement feel free to contact me.

Disable Acrobat Reader Internet Browser Integration
Setup a helper Application in Mozilla
Browser Extensions

Disable Acrobat Reader Internet Browser Integration

Open Adobe Acrobat Reader (NOT in Mozilla)
Select Edit
Preferences
Categories: Internet
uncheck "Display PDF in browser"

Setup a helper Application in Mozilla

Open Mozilla
Select Edit
Preferences
Helper-Applications
Remove any existing Helper Applications for pdf
Add a new Helper-Application
Mime type: application/pdf
Extension: pdf (no period)
Select "Open it with:" and click "Choose" to browse to the location of your favorite PDF-Reader Application

Note: Since an external Helper-Application is now used to display PDF Files the file needs to be completly downloaded before it can be viewed.

Browser Extensions

There are also some Browser Extensions available which let you select what you want to do with the PDF file:

Mozilla: PDF Download Extension
Firefox: PDF Download Extension

Note: These Plugins didn't work for me. Perhaps you are lucky...