Acrobat Plugin/Viewing Broken with Firefox 4.0.1.1 MSI

pomroy · Post by **pomroy** » Tue May 17, 2011 12:06 pm

Maybe it's just my environment and we're special but when we deployed the 4.0.1.1 MSI package it killed the plugin for Adobe Acrobat X Pro 10.0.3 in both I.E. and Firefox. Repairing or reinstalling Acrobat Pro seems to fix it but we're loathe to do that on every computer in our domain. Is there something different about the 4.0.1.1 update in regards to PDF viewing? We've never had a problem with the Firefox MSIs before, they've been a huge help in deploying the software quickly. Thanks for any info,

-Tom

DragonHawk · Post by **DragonHawk** » Tue May 17, 2011 12:53 pm

Can you explain what you mean by "killed", i.e., symptoms, error messages, any investigation you did?

pomroy · Post by **pomroy** » Tue May 17, 2011 1:11 pm

When you click a linked PDF in Firefox or IE, you get a popup message that indicates that Acrobat failed to load. The window is titled "Adobe PDF Document" and the text inside reads: "There is a problem with Adobe Acrobat/Reader. If it is running, please exit and try again. (1:1)". There's an "OK" button.

Update: running an msiexec /update command with the full path of the Acrobat 10.0.3 msp patch re-installs the patch and fixes the error. We'll test pushing that out via Config Manager.

I guess I'm surprised no one else has seen this issue yet. We've installed Acrobat 10 and Firefox 4.0.1 and 4.0.1.1 in a variety of ways and it always comes back to the FF 4.0.1.1 MSI that causes the breakage. Hoping that the next version doesn't do this, or that this version could be revised.

DragonHawk · Post by **DragonHawk** » Tue May 17, 2011 1:56 pm

pomroy wrote:I guess I'm surprised no one else has seen this issue yet.

Well, I can't speak for others, but we disable the PDF plugin anyway. We found it to be a source of all sorts of trouble (browser instability, security attacks, weird errors, update glitches, etc.), even before we started deploying Firefox.

What's really interesting is that the Firefox MSI is breaking MSIE's use of the plugin as well.

pomroy · Post by **pomroy** » Tue May 17, 2011 3:18 pm

Agreed. It leads one to believe that the FF MSI alters either Adobe-installed files or something in the OS. Seems strange that it could be either.

rgsteele · Post by **rgsteele** » Wed May 18, 2011 12:44 pm

I'm seeing an issue as well. When trying to open a PDF in IE, users get a message saying "The Adobe Acrobat/Reader that is running cannot be used to view PDF files in a web browser".

I found a KB Article on Adobe's site about this issue which advises to check that a registry key at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Software\Adobe\Acrobat\Exe is correctly set. On a computer which has had the Firefox MSI deployed to it, the HKCR\Software branch is missing.

Post by **DraconPern** » Wed May 18, 2011 8:01 pm

Found the problem! Thanks for identifying the specific issue, I will put out a .2 version to fix this since I imaging not able to view pdf is quite a problem! I am hoping this is the last install issue for awhile... And then I can move on to fixing that pesky default setting problem...

Post by **DraconPern** » Sat May 21, 2011 4:47 pm

want to note that the .2 are downloadable now.

wleung · Post by **wleung** » Mon May 23, 2011 10:48 am

I just installed 4.0.1.2 on a XP and a Win7 machine. Both are still unable to view PDF from the browser. -Wil

m0gely · Post by **m0gely** » Mon May 23, 2011 11:17 am

This is not a bug with Frontmotion or FF, but rather with Adobe Reader.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/756080

The work-arounds in that thread haven't worked for me. I have removed Reader X and re-deployed 9.4.4.

jpa · Post by **jpa** » Mon May 23, 2011 11:58 am

Just a guess but I suspect the 4.0.1.2 update fixes the problem where installing FrontMotion Firefox breaks in-browser PDF viewing but does not actually fix the problem caused by 4.0.1.1. If you run Acrobat manually it should clean up the problems caused by 4.0.1.1 and allow in-browser PDF.

pomroy · Post by **pomroy** » Mon May 23, 2011 12:37 pm

Testing the 4.0.1.2 package this morning. It appears that it doesn't break the in-browser PDF viewing if it's still working, but doesn't fix it if it's broken due to the 4.0.1.1 issue.

I'll probably deploy it widely soon but it won't undo the flood of helpdesk tickets we still have to clean up.

Thanks for releasing the fixed version quickly, at least now we're not deploying new machines pre-borked.

-Tom

Post by **DraconPern** » Mon May 23, 2011 2:34 pm

I can do a private release for this if you like? I assume you need 4.0.1 with en-US.

-edit-
I think i'll probably put out another release just to fix this issue.

Post by **DraconPern** » Mon May 23, 2011 3:25 pm

http://hicap.frontmotion.com/Beta/Firef ... -en-US.msi
http://hicap.frontmotion.com/Beta/FMFir ... -en-US.msi

Please test, Thanks! The rest of the languages are building.

-edit-
files removed due to some issues.

FrontMotion

Acrobat Plugin/Viewing Broken with Firefox 4.0.1.1 MSI

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