Some time ago my Chrome started to open PDFs in Google Docs viewer. I don't really know if I did something to force this behaviour, but I would like to view it as I was before (using Foxit Reader plugin).
Every link to a pdf file is replaced by Chrome: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://url.of.the.pdf
Have googled a bit but I can't find how to disable this 'feature'.
To disable Chrome from automatically using the Google Reader, go to "chrome://plugins/". Then locate and disable the plugin called "Chrome PDF Viewer". When this was installed, it should have automatically disabled your previous reader, (mine happend to be Adobe Acrobat, but this should work anyway). Then find your Foxit Reader Plugin entry, and re-enable that. Should work as soon as you load a PDF. You might want to restart Chrome to make sure, but for me it worked simply with a new tab.
If you are using Chrome as your browser, click on the Toolbar (wrench) in the upper-right corner, click "Tools," click "Extensions," and you should see the "Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google)" extension. If you do not find the "Extensions" in the menu, type chrome://chrome/extensions/ to the address bar.
To disable the viewer, simply click on the "Options" link. This will give you the option to check or uncheck the type of file you want Reader to handle (e.g., doc, docx, pdf, pps, tif, tiff). You can also type in domains (e.g., sites.google.com) that you want exempted from the viewer tool.
This worked for me without any problem.
Good luck!
Answer: No. The "View" button under Gmail file attachment uses Google Docs viewer. This is because the "View" button was specifically programmed by Google to use Google Docs viewer. (You can see how this would help promote Google Docs as a product). As of now there is no way to change this behavior. If it could be changed, it would be changed at the Gmail settings level which would say something like "Change default behavior of file attachment View button".
(From Google article) "Google Docs is also connected directly to Gmail. If you receive an attachment in Gmail, you can click the ‘View’ link, which will display that file attachment in the Google Docs."
Article from Google called: "View files in Google Docs" http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1738646
It is a plug-in and needs to be disabled (but stupid Google doesn't include an easy button to click to get to plug-ins).
From Google:
To disable the built-in viewer, enter
chrome:pluginsin the address bar and click Disable underneath the entry for “Chrome PDF Viewer.” The Adobe Reader plug-in will automatically be enabled, if you have it installed.
what you can do is;
that worked perfect for me...
Have you checked your extensions page to make sure you don't have anything that might do that? (To be totally sure, you should try disabling everything and reload a page with a PDF link.)
I can't say I've ever seen this, but then again I can't say I've ever tried Chrome on a system without Adobe [Acrobat] Reader installed already... what I can say is that my Chrome recently started opening PDFs with some new thing that seemed to be part of Chrome, though it was listed in the plugin list and could be disabled there, and that disabling both it and Adobe's plugin made Chrome do its "must download to download directory before opening" thing...
The Chrome PDF viewer plugin mentioned by blackmastiff actually comes with chrome and simply displays the file as is. It is not integrated with google drive/docs.
