It’s funny how college life ebbs and flows. Each of us ends up having our own rhythms based on the academic calendar, and some of them can be a little obscure. Like the clash between Firefox and Acrobat Reader that happens almost every fall.
As we did last year (and the year before that), we’re receiving scattered reports from people who are having issues downloading PDFs using Firefox. Specifically, they’re having a problem downloading and then viewing PDFs using the Reader plugin for Firefox.
Unfortunately, it’s not an easy issue to replicate, as it seems only happen with specific versions of Firefox and Acrobat Reader. Based on our experience from last year, we know that Firefox 3.x and Adobe Reader 8.x on Windows XP don’t play well together.
As a result, we recommend upgrading Firefox to version 3.5 and Adobe Reader to version 9.1. This combination of browser and plugin worked fine in our lab tests on Windows XP. We’ll be testing this combination on Vista as well, but given our experience last year, running the current versions of plugin and browser are the best way to avoid any problems rendering PDFs.
Folks at Lafayette can track this issue in Lafayette’s Moodle Support course; I’ll be posting updates about problems with specific versions there.