I love viewing PDFs on a Mac. The built-in Preview app is lightweight and good for 99% of what I need to do (if you need to digitally sign stuff, created PDFs, etc., then by all means get the official Acrobat reader/writer from Adobe.) I have the latest Acrobat installed (all 1GB or so of it) but I still want to use Preview and Safari's built-in PDF viewer for my daily browsing because it's fast, lightweight, and Just Works.

Until upgrading to Leopard and reinstalling my software, I hadn't had an issue with this at all. But since the upgrade, I started getting the following message when trying to open a PDF with Safari: AdobePDFViewer cannot find a compatible Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to view this PDF. Please select one.

Bummer.

And the dialog that pops up doesn't let me select the Preview app.

A quick Google search later, I find a forum post with the solution.

The thing to do is to delete the AdobePDFViewer.plugin file in the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder.

I have no idea when Adobe managed to sneak that plugin in there but it was a very naughty thing to do!

Deleting the plugin and restarting Safari has returned things to normal and PDFs now pop up quickly in the built-in previewer.

The AdobePDFViewer crashes my Leopard Safari party, gets booted! article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.