Safari 5.1.4: Restores ability to disable native support for display of PDF documents

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
March 17th, 2012 • 9:31 am

Now that Safari 5.1.4 is officially out, I am pleased to report what I have known since the first builds of this version became available to AppleSeed members, which is that, in this latest version, Apple has restored the ability to disable native support for display of PDF documents, an ability that was removed when Safari 5.1 first came out.

This means that, as described in this Mac OS X hint, by typing:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES

in Terminal and restarting Safari, you can once again force Safari to download every PDF file to the “Downloads” folder when you click on a link to a PDF file in a web page, instead of having the PDF load and display in the browser.

Unfortunately, they have not fixed the other PDF-related thing that they broke in Safari 5.1, which is that saving a PDF when it’s displayed in the browser by clicking on the “Save PDF” button at the bottom of the window fails to include the metadata about where the PDF came from with the saved PDF file.

However, now that the native support for display of PDF documents within the browser window can be disabled again, this is not a problem for people who opt to disable the native support, since, after disabling it, all the PDF files are automatically saved to the “Downloads” folder and all the PDF files saved that way do include the “Where from” metadata.

Now, if they could also bring back a proper, functioning “Downloads” window, that would make me really happy. But that’s probably too much to ask.


2 Responses to “Safari 5.1.4: Restores ability to disable native support for display of PDF documents”

  1. Michael Tsai - Blog - Disabling Safari 5.1’s PDF Viewer says:

    […] (2012-03-17): It’s back in Safari […]

  2. Betalogue » Safari in Mavericks: PDF downloading when native display is off is broken says:

    […] get all their PDF files automatically downloaded to their “Downloads” folder instead. (See this older post for more on […]