How To Avoid PDF Opening In Browser

To avoid PDFs opening in your browser (like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.) and instead force them to download or open in a dedicated PDF reader (like Adobe Acrobat), here’s how you can do it:

🧭 Choose Your Browser:

🔹 Google Chrome

Click the 3-dot menu → Settings
Go to Privacy and security → Site settings
Scroll down and click PDF documents
Turn on: “Download PDFs” instead of automatically opening them in Chrome

✅ Chrome will now download PDFs rather than open them.

🔹 Mozilla Firefox

Click the hamburger menu → Settings
Under General, scroll to Applications
Find Portable Document Format (PDF)
In the dropdown, choose:
- “Save File” to download
- “Use Adobe Acrobat Reader” to open with an external app

✅ Firefox will no longer open PDFs in-browser.

🔹 Microsoft Edge

Go to Settings (3-dot menu)
Click Cookies and site permissions → PDF documents
Turn on: “Always download PDF files”

✅ Edge will now download PDFs instead of opening them in the tab.

🔹 Safari (macOS)

Safari opens PDFs in-browser by default and doesn’t offer a built-in setting to disable it. Alternatives:

Right-click PDF links and choose “Download Linked File As…”
Or, use a different browser like Chrome with download settings above.

💡 Extra Tips

Right-click any PDF link and choose:
- “Save link as…” or
- “Download linked file”
  To force a download without changing settings.
On websites you control, you can force downloads by setting the link with download attribute: htmlCopyEdit<a href="file.pdf" download>Download PDF</a>