How Do I Get PDF files to Stop Opening When I download Them?

No option to disable auto open in Adobe settings and no Adobe Extension in Chrome:

Type ‘regedit’ into your computer’s task bar and open the files as show in the screenshot. For ever “AutoOpen” or “AutoDocOpen” option highlighted blue in the screenshot list above, right-click, select ‘Modify’ and change the binary from 1 to 0.

I don’t know which one exactly fixed the problem of stopping downloads from automatically opening, but I use Bluebeam Revu for my PDF viewer and never Acrobat, so I changed all of them. It’s a school laptop so I didn’t want to completely uninstall Acrobat.

I didnt find any option to remove like the “correct answer”, so I will leave my fix:

Open regedit and create these keys with default value to 0:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\AutoDocOpen  and DWORD32 key named  bIsAutoDocOpenFeatureEnabled set as 0.

Then,  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown  create these DWORD32 keys with value 0:

bIsAutoDocOpenEnabledForEdge
bIsAutoDocOpenFeatureEnabled
bIsAutoDocOpenFeatureEnabledNew
bIsAutoOpenFeatureEnabled

Dunno which one of them was the correct one, but either way I got the problem fixed on my side :v

This answer doesn’t seem to be working. I’m downloading PDFs and then Adobe Acrobat opens without my permission or prompting. It’s interfering dramatically with my workflow. How do I fix this? Seems like a security concern. 

Hi Lori,
Hope you are doing well!

It sounds like Adobe Acrobat is currently set to automatically open PDF files right after downloading — a behaviour controlled by a setting within the Acrobat application itself.

Here's how you can disable it:

1. Open Adobe Acrobat.
2. Press Ctrl + K to open the Preferences window.
3. In the left-hand menu, select the General tab.
4. Look for the option that says either:
• “Open PDFs automatically in Acrobat when they are downloaded in Chrome browser." or,
• "Always open PDFs downloaded from the web."
  
  Note: The wording may vary slightly depending on your version of Acrobat but unchecking that setting will stop PDFs from opening automatically after download.
5. Uncheck this option
6. Click OK to save your changes.

Once you've done this, PDF files will download normally without automatically opening in Acrobat.

@Lori24955494p3jw did you also briefly change the default application for PDFs. To resolve this, you need to adjust your Windows default app settings for PDF files. Simply locate the puzzle icon (extensions) in your Chrome browser:

Click on 'extensions'

Slide the radio button to the left. Make sure you save this.