Restore ability to open pdf files in external app on android

[Gabbro]

A recent change to Firefox on Android means that I can no longer open pdf files in an external app directly from Firefox. When I click on a link to a pdf file it first displays in Firefox, then gives me a link to download the file. Before, opening the downloaded file would take me to the default pdf viewer on my phone, now it just opens up in a new tab in Firefox. Users should have the choice of what app to view files in.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[marco]

We are re-thinking the behavior to make it easier for people to use external PDF readers if they wish.

Just out of curiosity, what features of the other app are you missing in the Firefox reader?

[Giacomo]

I'm astonished it's Mozilla that has imprisoned PDF files within Firefox for Android. I spent quite a bit of effort trying to figure out what I could have done wrong myself to lose the ability to export them to another app.

Now I need to switch to Chrome, which for years I've tried not to.

[Asperamanca]

Why on earth would anyone want to use the internal PDF viewer?

Example: PDF with a big(ish) table - like 40 columns, 30 rows. I need to zoom in to read the section I am interested in.

With Firefox: Jerky zooming, and I have to wait for around 5s at the end for the view to completely render

With Librera FD: Smooth zooming, I can already start reading before I am done zooming.

[pbp]

There is of course an obvious reason for some of us to not like a forced chance in the default pdf viewer app. Technically, the system's default is not changed, but it feels that way, since it makes no sense, why opening files from Firefox should be treated differently. It's a bit like Opening Links in Microsoft Teams defaults to Edge – only that people choose Firefox for not doing such things.

@marco Besides this rather fundamental point, I personally miss the list of my recently opened PDF files. If I view some of them only in Firefox, my Foxits list isn't complete. But it makes no sense to include this list as a feature in Firefox, I think. Where would should it be put?

[marco]

@Asperamanca thanks for the feedback, we'll work on improving performance when zooming.

@pbp we thought it would make sense to open the PDFs in Firefox because, coming from the web, they are potentially insecure and our PDF viewer is secure by definition being written in JavaScript and HTML (and this shows in the almost 0 security issues we have had in the PDF viewer history, compared to the thousands of other readers). That said, we (wrongly) assumed it would still be super easy to download PDFs and open them in other readers from a Download/File Manager app on the phone.

For the time being, we will revert this back to how it was working before. Then, we'll re-think the best approach to integrate the PDF viewer well within Firefox while still allowing people to make a choice where they want to open the PDFs.

Hearing reasons for **not** using the PDF viewer is also useful, because we'll take them into consideration as future improvements, so thank you for sharing that. The performance one is obvious, the list one will take some thinking but perhaps it makes sense for us to build something (e.g. maybe a specific section in the history, or a specific section in the downloads).

[caleb3]

I use an external PDF viewer because it opens in full screen mode and has an upload to cloud storage button. FF's viewer wastes significant viewing space because of the system bar, address bar, and also the download bar. I like to read PDFs with the phone horizontal and that's simply unusable in FF's viewer.

I also spent time trying to figure out what I had broken in my settings before finding this thread. I use FF because it generally is more respectful of my ability to have choices than the alternates. Really glad to hear the change will be reverted. When do you expect it to land in the app store updates?

[Tomfitzsr]

The ability to use an external app for reading/editing pdf must be restored. The recent changes made for now a second choice.

[marco]

In the next version the previous behavior will be restored.

[Neywiny]

I'm hopeful to see that change soon. I'm glad it's in but in case the team needs another reason: I tend to open a lot of big PDFs (electronics documentation) and have long incognito sessions (to avoid cookies). After a while the renderer will just go white and not show anything. That's when I use the external. Or if I'm comparing 2 because then I can do the split screen or quickly switch apps. Can't do that just in the browser. Thank you.