Blank black page instead of PDF document in Apple Safari web browser
Sometimes expectations are not met. The person looks forward to reading the user manual for the equipment he plans to buy, and instead ... a blank page appears on the screen. Indeed, sometimes the hyperlink does not lead to the next web page, but opens a PDF document directly in the browser. In most cases, this is not a problem, and for the user everything looks so transparent that he may not even think about what type of file is currently open. Modern browsers, without any third-party software add-ons, do an excellent job of opening PDF-format files that users usually view on mobile devices. But sometimes browsers Safari, Google chrome and Firefox at Mac OS X behave very differently from what the user expects. Instead of the PDF file posted on the link, the frustrated and frustrated reader finds himself on a black or white page that carries absolutely no information. Fortunately, this problem has a simple solution, which we will look at today.
Users experienced difficulties in opening PDF documents back in June last year. The problem has already been addressed by such leading English-language messengers of the "near-apple" community as TidBITS and Mac OS X Hints. Nevertheless, from time to time this topic reappears. For most users, everything opens properly. But the essence of any problem is that when it arises, the person is not interested in how the majority is doing. He would like to work normally. Since manuals for household appliances and statistical information are often presented in the form of PDF documents on the Internet, the ability to open them without problems is extremely important for many users.
Just in case, let's clarify: we are talking about the version of Safari for Mac computers, and not about the mobile version of this famous Apple browser, which is responsible for mobile Internet activity. In the market for web navigation for computer platforms, Safari takes a decent, but much more modest position. We are about the reasons for this state of affairs.
In most cases, the problem with reading PDF documents is rooted in two plugins from Adobe, which may "fail to find common ground" with modern browsers. These are the additions: AdobePDFViewer.plugin and AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin... They were installed with Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro and were intended to allow browsers to open PDF documents developed by Adobe.
These plugins for versions of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Pro earlier than 10.1.3 are currently incompatible with some browsers. We are talking mainly about Safari 5.1 (or later), as well as the latest versions of Firefox. The only difference in the problem is that Safari will show the user a black page, while Firefox will show a white page. But in either case, the page will be empty. If the user is faced with a similar situation, this is a sure sign that Adobe plugins are installed on his system that are incompatible with this browser. But, of course, there is always a small chance of any other reason for such browser behavior.
Before proceeding with the removal of plugins interfering with normal operation, be sure to close the browser. These add-ons are located in the folder Plug-ins, which in turn is located in the folder "Library"... This is not a hidden library in your home directory, whose address is denoted as ~ / Library / Internet Plug-Ins
No, in this case we are talking about a library, which is accessed directly from the root directory of your hard drive, that is / Library / Internet Plug-Ins
Open this folder and find all files that start with AdobePDFViewer and move them out of this folder (for example, temporarily "drop" them to the desktop). This is just a precaution so that plugins can be easily restored if desired, by putting them back in place. Moving these files will require you to enter your computer administrator username and password.
However, sometimes these plugins may appear in the library in your Home directory. On Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8, this folder is hidden. To enter it through the Finder, press the Option key and select the Go to Library action (Library in the English version of Go). This library has an internet add-on folder "Internet Plug-Ins".
Go to it. If there are plugins AdobePDFViewer, move them out of this folder. The action will require entering the administrator's login and password. In fact, everything is the same as in a library of the level of the entire computer, only with some subtleties that we considered necessary to consider separately.
When the plugins have been moved out of the library, restart the web browser in which the problem manifested itself. Try to open the PDF document from the link. If it was really about Adobe plugins, then it will open correctly by the software of the browser itself.
Based on materials from TidBITS.com
PDFs won't open in Internet Explorer with Adobe Reader 10.0 - users get a blank gray screen. How can I fix this for my users? (7)
There is a known issue with PDF opening in Internet Explorer (v 6, 7, 8, 9) with Adobe Reader X (version 10.0. *). The browser window loads with a blank gray screen (and doesn't even have a Reader toolbar). It works great with Firefox, Chrome, or Adobe Reader 10.1. *.
I've found several workarounds. For example, clicking Refresh will load the document correctly. Upgrade to Adobe Reader 10.1. *, Or downgrading to 9. *, also fixes the problem.
However, all these solutions require from the user to understand it ... Most of my users get very embarrassed to see this gray screen and end up blaming the PDF file and accusing the website of breaking it. Honestly, until I researched this, I blamed PDF too!
So I am trying to figure out a way to fix this problem for my users.
I considered providing a Download PDF link (which sets the Content-Disposition header to attachment instead of inline), but my company doesn't like that at all because we really want these PDFs to display in the browser.
Has anyone else experienced this problem?
What are the possible solutions or workarounds?
I really hope for a solution that ideally fits end users because I can't rely on them to know how to change their Adobe Reader preferences or automatically install updates.
Here's a scary gray screen:
Edit : screenshot removed from file server! I'm sorry!
The image was a browser, with a regular toolbar, but a solid gray background, no interface.
Background information :
While I don't think the following information is related to my problem, I'll include it for reference:
This is ASP.NET MVC app and jQuery is available.
The link to the PDF file has target \u003d _blank so that it opens in a new window.
The PDF is generated on the fly and all content headers are set accordingly. The url does NOT include the .pdf extension, but we are setting the content-disposition header with a valid .pdf filename and an inline parameter.
Edit : Here is the source code that I am using to work with PDF files.
First, the controller action:
Public ActionResult ComplianceCertificate (int id) (byte pdfBytes \u003d ComplianceBusiness.GetCertificate (id); return new PdfResult (pdfBytes, false, "Compliance Certificate (0) .pdf", id);)
And here is PdfResult (PdfResult, inherits from System.Web.Mvc.FileContentResult):
Using System.Net.Mime; using System.Web.Mvc; ///
In my case, the solution was pretty simple. I added this header and browsers opened the file in every test. header ("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename \u003d" filename.pdf "");
We got this problem even after updating to the latest version of Adobe Reader.
Two different methods solved this for us:
- Using the free version of Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader
- But since most of our clients use Adobe Reader, so instead of requiring users to use Foxit Reader, we started using window.open (url) to open the pdf instead of window.location.href \u003d url. Adobe was losing the file descriptor in different iframes for some reason when the PDF was opened using the window.location.href method.
I had this problem. Reinstalling the latest version of Adobe Reader did nothing. Adobe Reader worked in Chrome but not IE. This worked for me ...
1) Go to IE Tools -\u003e Compatibility View.
2) Enter the website with the PDF you want to view. Click OK.
3) Restart IE 4) Go to the website you entered and select PDF. He should appear.
5) Go back to compatibility view and delete the entered entry.
6) Adobe Reader works now in IE on all websites.
This is a weird fix, but it worked for me. I needed to go through the Adobe Accept screen after reinstallation, which only appeared after I did the View Compatibility View trick. Once adopted, it seemed to work everywhere. Quite flaky material. Hope this helps someone.
I don't have an exact solution, but I will share my experience with this in case they help anyone else.
From my testing, gray screen only starts up on slower machines. To date, I have not been able to recreate it on newer hardware. All my tests were in IE8 with Adobe Reader 10.1.2. For my tests, I disabled SSL and removed all headers that could disable caching.
To recreate the gray screen, I followed these steps:
1) Go to the page that links to the PDF
2) Open the PDF in a new window or tab (either through the context menu or in target \u003d "_blank")
3) In my tests, this PDF will open without error (however, I got user reports indicating a failure when the PDF was first downloaded)
4) Close the newly opened window or tab
5) Open the PDF (again) in a new window or tab
6) This PDF does not open, but instead only the "gray screen" mentioned by the first user is displayed (all subsequent downloadable PDFs are also not displayed) until all browser windows are closed)
I have performed the above test with several different PDFs (both static and dynamic) generated from different sources and the greyed out issue always occurs when the above steps are executed (on a "slow" computer).
To mitigate the problem in my application, I "ripped" the page that links to the PDF (parts removed piece by piece until the gray screen no longer occurs). In my particular application (built on the closing library), removing all references to goog.userAgent.adobeReader seemed to fix the problem. This exact solution won't work with jquery or .net MVC, but maybe this process can help you isolate the source of the problem. I haven't taken the time to isolate the part of goog.userAgent.adobeReader that is triggering the error in Adobe Reader, but most likely jquery may have the same plugin detection code used in the closing library.
Machine experiences gray screen:
Win Server "03 SP3
AMD Sempron 2400+ @ 1.6 GHz
256 MB memory
The machine does not experience a gray screen:
Win XP x64 SP2
AMD Athlon II X4 620 @ 2.6 GHz
4 GB memory
Experimenting more, the main reason in my application (call to goog.userAgent.adobeReader) was to access the Adobe Reader through an ActiveXObject on the page with the PDF link. This minimal test case causes a gray screen for me (however, deleting the ActiveXObject does not cause a gray screen).
I am very interested if others can reproduce the problem with this test case and following the steps from my other post (“I don’t have an exact solution ...”) on a “slow” computer.
Sorry for posting a new answer, but I couldn't figure out how to add a code block to the comment on my previous post.
An example video of this minimal test case is below: http://youtu.be/IgEcxzM6Kck
I realize this is a fairly late post, but still a possible OP solution. I am using IE9 on Win 7 and have been running into Adobe Reader gray screen issues for months trying to open an online bank in PDF and credit cards. I could open everything in Firefox or Opera, but not IE. I finally tried PDF-Viewer, set it as the default PDF viewer in my preference and more problems. I'm sure there are other free viewers like Foxit, PDF-Xchange, etc. that will give better results than Reader with less headaches. Adobe is like some of the other big companies that develop software to take it or keep it ... so I left it.
For Win7 Acrobat Pro X
Since I did all of this without rechecking to see if the problem still occurred after doing this, I'm not sure if they actually fixed the problem because of this, but one of them did. In fact, after doing # 3 and rebooting, it worked fine.
FYI: Below is the order in which I went through the repair.
Go to Control Panel\u003e Folder Options in each Control Panel General, View and Search click the Restore Defaults button Reset Folders button
Go to Internet Explorer, Tools\u003e Options\u003e Advanced\u003e Reset (I didn't need to delete personal settings)
Open Acrobat Pro X, under Edit\u003e Preferences\u003e General.
At the bottom of the page, select Default PDF Handler. I selected Adobe Pro X and click Apply.
You may be asked to reboot (I did).
Best wishes
Internet Explorer 11 & 10 are considered the best versions Microsoft branded browser; Internet Explorer... With Windows 8 and Windows 7, you can use IE 10 and IE 11. In both of these iterations, some users ran into the problem that when they try to download and open a PDF, Internet Explorer won't open PDF files.
Sometimes IE just freezes while downloading PDF files. For this problem; you can use the Task Manager to end your session. There have been cases when many times, the file is downloaded, but partially. They may open very well in other browsers, but not IE.
So how can you solve this IE behavior? Well, a simple thing that could fix is \u200b\u200bto set the default PDF reader to " Reader"Presented in Windows 10 / 8.1 , or any other third party PDF reader of your choice. This will fix the problem. But if it isn't, you can try this registry fix to fix this problem:
PDF files won't open in Internet Explorer
1. Click Windows Key + R combination, enter put Regedt32.exe at Run dialog box and press Enter to open Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software Microsoft Internet Explorer Main
3. In the right pane of that location, find TabProcGrowth named DWORD. This DWORD is actually short from Tab process growth; which sets the speed at which IE creates New Tab processes. If you find a DWORD, it should have a Value of 0. If you don't find it, create it manually using Right Click -\u003e New -\u003e DWORD Value. Now click on the same DWORD to change its Data Value:
4. Now set the given values from 0 to 1... Click OK... Putting the data value 1 ensures that all tabs for a given frame process are executed in the same tab process for a given Mandatory Integrity Level (MIC) level. You can now close Registry Editor and reboot to see the results.
Hope you find the fix useful!
Good afternoon. I have been using the Google Chrome browser almost since the official announcement, and I really like it. And now it so happened that even Opera has already switched to the Chromium engine and in its essence is the same Chrome, only with a slightly modified shell and "other" functions. I already wrote somehow about how in browsers. Today we will touch upon a slightly different topic, namely: disabling the browser plug-in for viewing. I can't really explain why this is, but I don't like the fact that .pdf files open in the browser. I find it more convenient to use Acrobat Reader or STDU Viewer. If for some reason your plugin stopped working and you need it, thanks to this article you will learn how to turn it back on.
1. Google Chrome and all browsers on the Chromium engine (CoolNovo, RockMelt, Rambler Nichrom, Yandex.Browser, [email protected]). May also work for Opera above version 15.
1) Open a browser and type the following in the address bar:
chrome: // plugins /
We get to the plugins page:
Chrome PDF Viewer ”and disable it. Depending on the browser, the item may have a different name, for example, in Yandex browserviewer is called Yandex PDF Viewer.
That's it, now .pdf files will be opened through the program installed on your computer.
2. Mozilla Firefox.
1) Open the browser, click on the button Firefoxtop left → “Settings” → “Settings”.
2) In the window that opens, go to the "Applications" tab. Enter into search Portable Document Format:
3) Choose Portable Document Format (PDF) and click on the triangle on the right in the right column, here we select what we want to do with the PDF files by selecting the last item ( use another) you can set a specific program to open files. I prefer to select "Save file", which will bring up the file download window, and then work with the file as I like.
