My parents email is the web client from suddenlink. Dad gets a lot of crochet patterns in pdf format. Firefox lets him click the attachment, it opens a tab, and displays a bunch of binary crap.
Firefox never gives me the normal dialogue box, open or save pdf.
I can click a pdf on a web site (like the dope)and it opens fine. It’s something weird with this email client.
As a work around, I can right click the attachment, save as, and it will save as a pdf. I can open it on the hard drive using Adobe Reader.
My dad is over 80 and this is confusing the heck out of him. Every time he gets a crochet pattern, I get a phone call, and I have to walk him through the process of saving and then opening the file on the hard disk & printing. That means opening file explorer. :smack: Very confusing for him.
Any ideas on what I can do?
Dad is bad about grabbing stuff with the mouse. I hate letting him in Explorer. He may grab folders and drop them no telling where. It could take days for me to fix the damage.
Have you tried this yourself (with your own browser) in that webmail site? It could be an issue with the site.
That said, I’m using Firefox 3 (3.5) and it’s fairly good at figuring out the file type of downloads. It may be that some kind of configuration option has been messed up. You may want to try resetting the actions related to downloads. Dunno if you can do that yourself - the actions aren’t too complicated, but I wouldn’t send those instructions to people who are not too good with computers.
I’m fairly sure that if that was the issue, the PDF would just be offered as a download instead of as a “text” file to be displayed. Unless it’s been set to “preview in firefox”, maybe - so worth checking out anyway.
The problem is very likely with the site. Send them an email and tell 'em to fix it. If it does work on IE, the problem is still with the site, but now you’ve got a work-around.
Okay, this tells me that the plug-in is installed. Are you blocking a script? The Firefox extension NoScript lets you white and black list scripts on a per site basis. You might also try installing the FoxIt PDF reader. It’s faster than Adobe anyway and perhaps it will work on that page.
Which is a perfectly cromulent work-around.
Set up a separate user account for him with his own directory. That way he can only mess with that directory and can’t unintentionally screw up the system settings. This is default under Linux but it can easily be done under Windows.
The webmail opens pdf’s perfectly under IE. So, I’ve asked my parents to start using IE only for email. Easy enough fix.
I recall years ago a lot of web sites had issues with Firefox. I’d gotten spoiled because nearly everything works perfectly now. But, suddenlink’s webmail does have this issue. The other mail features work fine under Firefox. It’s only PDF attachments. For some reason, it’s not properly recognizing the file format.
Up until about a year ago, my parents were using IE for everything. I kept warning my mom how insecure it was. When they went to Win 7, they agreed to use Firefox for everything. We got all their Favorites switched to bookmarks and they were happy.
You didn’t even have to do that. Install IETab (preferably the one with adblock for securities sake), and set it to automatically load that site in IE.
I also could provide you with an addon I wrote and use that would automatically use Google Docs for all PDFs (and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). But, in order to be safe, it has to add an icon to every PDF link, just in case the provider calls something a PDF when it isn’t (which happens more often than you’d expect.)
Every time he gets a crochet pattern, I get a phone call, and I have to walk him through the process of saving and then opening the file on the hard disk & printing. That means opening file explorer. :smack: Very confusing for him.