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dtdimitrov
Known Participant
March 13, 2020
Question

PDF AcroForms stopped working properly in IE11 on some Win10 PCs

  • March 13, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 433 views

Hello guys,


We have a Web application with PDF forms (FDF AcroForms) that are accessed by our customers remotely from Internet via a browser (IE11 + Adobe Reader plugin). Thousands of users do not have any problems. Recently (a couple of weeks ago), for some unknown reason some of our users started experiencing a problem - forms open the PDF document but do not load any data nor Javascripts. Neither an error nor a message is shown. The problem happens on some Win10 computers only. The same users did not have any problems in previous days.

 

(The server's host name is configured properly in Adobe Reader as a Privileged Location, so the problem is not there. Even if it is not configured as a Privileged Location, the form does not ask for it. Nothing happens even if we disable "Enhanced Security" in Adobe Reader preferences).

 

We tried with deinstalling IE11 and Adobe Reader, cleaning Adobe Reader up (deleting all its C:\Users\..\Local, ..\LocalLow and ..\Roaming folders, and removing all Adobe related keys from Windows Registry), then installing IE11 and Adobe Reader. We tried with both Adobe Reader DC and Adobe Reader 2017 (updated to latest releases), but the problem persisted on these computers.

 

A Chromium 41 browser works fine on the same computers, in the same user profiles, with the same Adobe Reader installations (even though Chromium 41 is not certified with Win10).


Has anybody experienced a similar problem recently?

 

Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
March 13, 2020

Did you check to see if MS did a recent upgrade of the OS that might have knocked out IE?

IE is a very old browser and MS did make some noise about eventually discontiuing support for it. Maybe "eventually" has happened?

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
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dtdimitrovAuthor
Known Participant
March 14, 2020

I have not heard rumors about IE discontinueing. IE11 is still there and it works. These Win10 computers open successfully PDF files in IE11 browser using Adobe PDF Reader plugin. PDF Forms do not work correctly though. When approaching a PDF Form, the plugin opens the PDF document specified in the FDF and stops there - it neither warns about a non-trusted hostname (if hostname has not already been put to Privileged Locations), nor loads field values from FDF, not loads Javascripts from FDF.

 

The problem started happening suddenly. One of our customers told us that a couple of days ago she had worked with no problems in the morning but it stopped working properly in the afternoon. She had not pefromed any Windows installations or updates in meanwhile.

 

I tried IE11's InPrivate browsing mode (where all the other plugins are switched off), but it did not make any difference. I suspected some automatic Windows update might be causing the problem, but the other customers with latest Windows updates do not experience such problems.

 

At one computer we created a clean new Windows user profile, tried with it and the problem appeared again. We reinstalled Adobe Reader but this did not help. Then we reinstalled IE11 and the problem stopped hapening in this user profile. However, whe we switched back to the original user profile, the problem was still there. We repeated the reinstallation of Adobe Reader and IE11 there, but it did not help 😞

 

Even more strange is that one of our customers told us that she tried many many times and sometimes the PDF form got loaded with data.

 

All these make me think there is some weird misfunction in Adobe Reader plugin's integration with IE11 or vise versa.

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