adobe acrobat + firefox = pain

Posted on by Leisa Reichelt

Is it just me?

Adobe Acrobat has given me a lot of grief in the past few months… in lots of different ways that I don’t really understand. I find myself constantly having to kill Firefox if it opens a PDF in a browser window.

In the last two days I’ve had a PDF file open in a tab that I was trying to close. I only wanted to close that tab, but everything I’d try to close it, Firefox would totally lose it and freeze up until I’d Ctrl+Alt+Delete and kill it that way.

I finally worked out what was going on this afternoon. It seems that when I ask Firefox to close the tab, Acrobat wants to check if I really want to close the application, and it throws up a dialogue box to that effect… but the dialogue box appears *behind* my frozen (and unmovable) Firefox window.

The only way to ‘click’ it to make it go away and to unfreeze Firefox and close the tab seems to be to go back to ‘View Desktop’, then choose to view your Firefox session, which then pulls the dialogue box to the front, for some reason, where you can close it. Firefox then behaves normally again, and the PDF document and tab close.

I’m not sure whether this is Adobe or Firefox’s fault… but I’d sure like to give who ever it is a slap. Very, very annoying.

5 thoughts on “adobe acrobat + firefox = pain”

  2. This is a constant source of annoyance to me as well. Back when I used IE I would get hangs with PDFs sometimes, but far less frequently, so my thinking is that this is an Acrobat issue that is not resolvable by the browser itself.

    But I’m no software developer, so I have no idea. Until then, I use the same hack Lou noted: Download the PDF rather than view it in the browser.

  3. Not really looked into the issue all that much but one thing that comes to mind, you’re loading a large resource into a browser window. Load anything large in a browser window and the browser will start to struggle. Firefox and Safari especially seem to have trouble with this.

  4. *hugs leisa* I feel your pain.
    PDF’s appear as blank pages for me! I should get that new acrobat version and cross my fingers and hope it fixes whatever is wrong with firefox. All my file associations have disappeared! I can’t even tell it to load PDF’s externally like I was to get around the problem before. Ugh. I’m thinking about wiping my firefox profile and starting with a fresh one…

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