Participating Frequently

Question

Adobe Reader 9.4.2 - PDFs won't open in IE 8 & IE 9

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
February 16, 2011
12 replies
57598 views

The recent Adobe Reader 9.4.2 is causing issues with PDFs opening in IE 8 and 9 browsers. Prior to this update our users have had no issues with opening PDFs generated by our website.

Our website generates USPS labels using Siberix ReportWriter software. We have not released any updates for at least a month. Again, before the release of Adobe Reader 9.4.2, there was no issues with our website's PDFs opening in IE browsers.

User System Specs:

Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 Ultimate

Adobe Reader 9.4.2

Internet Explorer 8 - "File Download" window issue

Internet Explorer 9 - "File Download" window issue

Firefox 3.6.13 - No Issues

Chrome 9.0.597.98 (with Adobe Reader 9.4.2 plugin enabled and Chrome PDF Viewer disabled) - No Issues

The "File Download" window states the following (in addition to a Save and a Cancel button): "The file you are downloading cannot be opened by the default program. It is either corrupt or it has an incorrect file type. As a security precaution, it is recommended that you cancel the download. ..."

We have the following workarounds to address this issue with our customers, but they are not ideal:

Update to Adobe Reader X
Disable "Display PDF in browser" Reader option
Don't update Adobe Reader 9 to 9.4.2
Install other PDF Reading software.

Any solutions to this issue would be appriciated.

Thanks

This topic has been closed for replies.

T

tableplusl60783850

Participant

Subtitle Edit Mac Crack is a free subtitle editor that you can use to create, edit and save video subtitles. Windows allows you to sync subtitles to any video, movie, or program you’re watching.

W

william24227672y1em

Participant

It is one of various solutions that, depending on the circumstances, may be acceptable to some. My organisation, on the other hand, has hundreds of customers, many of whom do not have administrator privileges on their workstations and each with their own install/update procedures administered by their own IT departments corecrack. In our case, this makes upgrading to Adobe Reader X a less than desirable choice.

S

Steven24204327ne1q

Participant

I am a professional blogger. visit my website https://uptocrack.com/

A

Anonymous

Greetings,

My agency started recieving complaints about this problem last Friday.

We have a variety of pdfs that will not download in IE. Firefox and Chrome have no problems with the download. Let me give you some samples:

http://www.scdot.org/doing/bridge/06design_manual.shtml (if you click on the SCDOT Bridge Design Manual link in the first paragraph)

http://www.scdot.org/doing/tenyear.shtml (select any county from the county dropdown, and select GO)

I have numerous other complaints. The Bridge Design Manual has for several years, the ten year content was places on the site within the last few weeks.

The files work fine when downloaded locally.

I have installed version 10.0.1 and this does not correct the problem. IE9 reports the following versions of the adobe add-ons:

Adobe PDF: 9.4.0.195

Adobe PDF Link Helper: 10.0.1.434

Adobe PDF conversion toolbar: 9.4.0.195

SmartSelect Class: 9.4.0.195

Is there a fix for this yet?

Thanks!

David

R

Rudi Sherry

Adobe Employee

I looked at this site and there actually appears to be something wrong with the server. In IE, I clicked "Saved Target As..." for the "SCDOT Bridge Design Manual" and it stalled at about 26KB. When I do this, Reader is not involved at all since it's just IE saving the file locally.

I tried downloading it in IE8 and Firefox 3 and both stalled. I tried this on Firefox 3 macintosh (which Adobe Reader doesn't support) and the same thing happened. Your particular file doesn't appear to be a Reader issue.

Can you check that your server is not getting some sort of error trying to read this file?

A

Anonymous

Thanks for the quick response. I will have our server team look at it and see what they can figure out.

D

Darian G

Participant

I am unable to open pdf document(can only save) from websites also but i am using adobe reader x.

A

Anonymous

Hi,

I tried most of the steps on this read and it still does not work 100%. Here are my steps.

a) Header has already been set to application/pdf.

b) Failed

c) Added Response.Charset = null:

- Internet Explorer: Works

- Firefox: Works

- Chrome.. using the steps listed above: Does not work

- Safari: Does not work

Can you provide some additional information on how you were able to get this feature to work in Chrome/Safari?

Thanks,

Jason

J

jspraul

Participant

This thread is discussing work-arounds to a specific issue caused by the combination of Internet Explorer and Acrobat Reader v9.4.2. The specific browser versions are Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9. (Neither older nor newer versions of the Acrobat Reader plugin for Internet Explorer have this specific issue; neither do any version of the Firefox plugins.)

Safari and Chrome may not even use a plugin to view PDF files (for example, on the Chrome developer channel). Although I am not sure what you mean by "does not work", the first thing I would verify is that a local copy of the PDF can be viewed using those browsers. If you can verify that it opens successfully and also determine that the plugin being used is Adobe Reader v9.4.2, you should be able to fix the problem by updating the plugin to v10.

If all of the above holds true and your users are stuck with v9.4.2 then more information is needed (the way things aren't working, HTTP headers, etc.). If not, I would recommend asking this question as a separate topic (if the problem is not v9.4.2 of the Acrobat Reader plugin) or on a Chrome/Safari-specific or more general forum (if the versions of those browsers which you need to support are not using the Acrobat Reader plugin).

J

jspraul

Participant

In C#, you need the following:

Response.Charset = null;

to make sure the HTTP header looks like:

Content-Type: application/pdf

instead of having a value Adobe Reader v9.4.2 can't handle:

Content-Type: application/pdf; charset=UTF-8

C

CDI_SupportAuthor

Participating Frequently

Sorry about the delay in my response.

We tried your suggestion and set the Response.Charset = Nothing (vb.net). Unfortunately, this didn't correct the issue for us.

Thanks for your input, and hopefully it helped someone else.

V

vuday

Participant

Even I have faced similar when I have upgraded my adobe to 9.4.2 version. I was creating pdfs on the fly by writing to the response stream directly in the java servlet. Adding the line response.reset() before populating the response headers and content had solved my issue.

S

Safari Dave

Participant

Hi. Referring to the initial post - Why isn't upgrading to Reader X considered a recommended fix? Adobe Updater is indeed keeping me at Acrobat & Reader 9.4.2 without notifying me of the Acrobat/Reader X (v 10) upgrade.

(I did upgrade to Acrobat/Reader X (Ver 10) on a Win XP SP3 system with Creative Suite 3, which seems to fix this problem, but I'm holding off for Adobe's fix on a Win 7 64bit system with CS5 - both systems with IE8). ?

thx,

Safari Dave

C

CDI_SupportAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Dave,

It is one of several workarounds that might be acceptable for some depending on the circumstances. For my company, however, we have thousands of clients, many of which do not have administrative privilages on their machines, and each with their own install/update policies that are managed by their own IT departments. This makes updating to Adobe Reader X a less than ideal solution in our situation.

R

Rudi Sherry

Adobe Employee

@RStoddart: wow, impressive workaround... but it is fragile, so users beware. Uninstalling, patching to new dot-releases or upgrading major versions with that registry item in there will have, how do they say "undefined results". Of course, unless something better is found, it's the best so far.

It looks like the new version doesn't handle anything after "application/pdf". Unfortunate, and something that is important to fix.

A

Anonymous

We are experiencing the same problem, as I mentioned below. I did some research and experimentation, and have a ... workaround. It's not completely satisfactory, but we will go with it until we have a complete solution. Perhaps the following will help others and spur some research in the right direction.

First, a quick review. The problem does not occur with PDFs located on disk; it only occurs with direct streaming of PDF data. Let's also note that the problem does NOT occur with other browsers, e.g. FireFox. So ... technically the problem is not an Adobe Reader problem and we're all on the wrong forum.

My specialty is databases and I'm certainly no expert in this area, but from what I'm able to gather the problem is instead with how IE is recognizing and responding to the MIME type of the streamed data. We're all setting the contenttype to "application/pdf" (or similar) or we wouldn't even be here. But I'm concluding that something - some windows update - has changed the way IE on clients or (in my case) IIS on the server is handling that data stream. If any of you experiencing this issue have servers other than IIS, then the problem is on the client side, I'd say.

Aaaaaanyway, the following articles are old, but helped me:

To cut to the chase, the workaround we're going with for now is to add the following to the http response header (this is C#/ASP.NET code):

Response.AppendHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=myfile.pdf");

That causes a popup dialog to appear asking the user to open or save the PDF, something that is familiar to most everyone. If the user asks to open the file, it appears in a browser window just as it did before this problem occurred. Again, this is a temporary solution, but at least the user can see the PDF data in a browser with one extra mouse click.

If an Adobe tech support person or anyone with more experience in this area knows the final solution, I'd LOVE to hear it. Please reply here or in email.

Thanks and good luck all.

BillyB

C

CDI_SupportAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for your reply,

Yes, it does look like this is an issue with streaming, but it's not a very consistent one. In my second post, I noted that I tested this with several of our streamed PDFs, and some of them worked, while others did not.

However, I do think this is an Adobe Reader 9.4.2 specific issue. I tested it myself: Before the Reader update, it worked correctly. After I updated to 9.4.2 it stopped working correctly. Also note that there were no corresponding windows or IE updates (I have my windows update service set to download but not install). And, again, this is an issue that isn't consistent... we have some streaming PDFs open correctly, while others do not.

It's good that you found a workaround that works for you for the moment. Unfortunatly, this does not perform in the way our clients expect, so this won't be a solution that we can use. I'm open to anymore suggestions, but we need for the PDFs to open directly, without any prompts, and without the client having to do anything on their end (which my be impossible at this point).

As I suggested in my opening post, we have found several workarounds to the issue, but they are not ideal (they fix the issue, but they require our clients to make the fix on their side, which is something that they shouldn't have to do).

Hopefully Adobe will release an update soon to correct this issue (along with some other issues it seems to be having).

Thanks again,

R

RStoddart

Participant

@BillyBeeeeee: Just because it works in Firefox and not in IE doesn't rule out Adobe Reader as the cause of the problem.

Firefox uses the following dll: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Browser\nppdf32.dll

IE uses the files under: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\

An initial fix for me was to replace the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\AcroPDF.dll (version 9.4.2.220) with the version from Adobe Reader 9.4.1 (version 9.4.0.195) and this seemed to solve the problem. This wasn't a realistic solution though as I have no idea what security holes I might introduce by doing this.

After some monitoring of the headers from links with fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/) that worked versus the ones that didn't the common problem seemed to be:

Working: Content-Type: application/pdf

Broken: Content-Type: application/pdf;charset=UTF-8

Previously I had been monitoring IE with process monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645) trying the different versions of the AcroPDF.dll loaded to find out what the difference was and I noticed with the new dll was trying to access "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/pdf;charset=UTF-8". After digging further I've managed to add this registry key:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\MIME\Database\Content Type\application/pdf;charset=UTF-8]
"AdobeMimeTreatAs"="application/pdf"

This seems to fix it for me.

I know it isn't a solution for most of the issues on this post, and I don't know if your issues are related to the the headers but I thought it might help someone in the right direction or even better help Adobe fix the root cause.

A

Anonymous

Same issue here ... we're creating PDFs on the fly (streaming them) on

our website. Worked with 9.4.1, broken with 9.4.2. Help!!!

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded