Stop saving PDFs to Downloads when viewing in Firefox

[PrimsAlg]

While this has been shared elsewhere, I can't seem to find any actual response from Mozilla other than "we changed it, and now it's like this". When choosing to open a PDF in Firefox, it now saves it directly to Downloads. I (and it seems like quite a lot of other people as well) need to frequently view a document in Firefox, but I rarely need to save it. If I wanted to save it, I would either choose to save it in the first place or use the download button in the PDF viewer. Now I have to block off part of my week to go clean out all of the PDF garbage that gets thrown into Downloads because Mozilla decided to ignore temporary files as a concept and not provide an option to revert back to the normal behavior. There seems to be no practical reason for this change. Please let Firefox use temp files when viewing PDFs rather than turning everyone's Downloads folder into a trash bin.

[beeRian]

Hi.  I'm just here to pile on another complaint about this ridiculous feature.  Where's the setting to have firefox also through a pie in my face every time I click "back?"  Cause that would be just as welcome.

[jscher2000]

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@beeRian wrote:

Hi.  I'm just here to pile on another complaint about this ridiculous feature.

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There are a variety of settings to fine-tune how Firefox handles PDFs and other kinds of downloads. What is your preferred behavior?

Assuming you keep the setting to open PDFs in a tab in Firefox

(1) When Firefox opens a file type in a tab, use the system temp folder instead of the Downloads folder (not PDF specific). (see earlier replies about: browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir)

(2) View all PDFs in a tab, but instead of saving some in Downloads and some in the web content cache, save them all in the cache. (see earlier replies about: browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline)

(3) View PDFs in a tab if the site intended that, but if the site intended that they be downloaded, pop up a dialog to ask how I want to view them (old behavior). (preference: browser.download.force_save_internally_handled_attachments)

If you do not want to open PDFs in Firefox

Check the options in this article: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/choose-your-preferred-pdf-viewer-firefox 

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Where's the setting to have firefox also through a pie in my face every time I click "back?"

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Fun idea for an add-on.