Ubuntu
firefox package

  1. Bug #1551171
  2. Comment #38

Comment 38 for bug 1551171

Revision history for this message
In , Mauro (mauromol) wrote :

Hitting this same problem in Kubuntu 20.04.
My case is this. In /usr/share/applications/defaults.list I had this:
application/pdf=org.gnome.Evince.desktop;google-chrome.desktop

I guess the trailing ";google-chrome.desktop" was in some way added by installing Chrome.
Firefox says my default PDF application is Chrome, while all the other system components (Dolphin, xdg-mime, xdg-open) correctly say that my default is Okular.

After editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list to remove the trailing ";google-chrome.desktop", now Firefox correctly knows my default application for PDFs is Okular. No need to restart Firefox, the change was immediate.

Strange enough, I don't have Evince installed, but many other file types are associated with Evince in that defaults.list file. I guess Evince is ignored because it is not installed. On the contrary, Chrome is installed and so it's honored by Firefox, but in this case it's skipping and ignoring my actual system settings for PDF file association.

So, there must be some problem here.