If you’re a Firefox fan and prefer it over or in addition to Safari, you may want to take a few minutes to adjust the settings. After all, you want your web browsing experience to be as good as possible.
One such setting is the apps Firefox uses to compose an email, open a file, or view an image. Luckily, Firefox offers this setting in the app itself. So you don’t have to make any changes to your Mac’s settings.
1) Open Firefox on your Mac to get started and click Firefox > Settings or Preferences. You can also click the menu button in the upper right corner and select Settings.
2) Make sure you are in the General tab on the left side.
3) Scroll down to Files and Applications. You’ll see a section for Applications. This is where you’ll choose the apps or actions you want to use for each content type. This includes things like plain text documents, PDFs, images, and the default email application.
If you prefer to take an action instead of opening an app, you have that option, too. Next to each Content Type are the Actions available.
You can instruct Firefox to Always ask what to do with the item or Save the file.
The first action is ideal if you don’t always do the same thing or use the same app for that content. Like with an image, sometimes you might want to open it in Preview, but other times you may want to open it directly in your image editing tool.
If you choose to save the file automatically, just make sure you always want that action for the content type.
On the other hand, if you always want the link to an email address, ZIP file, or PDF to open with a specific app, just select that in the Action column next to the content type.
For example, for “mailto” (links to an email address), you can pick from Mail, Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail. The apps you see in the list depend on the content type.
You can also choose to use your macOS default application for that type of content. This is handy for plain text to open in Text Edit and ZIP files to open with Archive Utility, for instance.
If you don’t see the app you want to use in the list and there is no macOS default, click Use other. Then, select the app installed on your Mac that you want to use for that item. For example, you can pick Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF files if you have it installed.
In Firefox on iPhone and iPad, you can currently make only one adjustment, which is the default email app.
1) Open Firefox and tap the menu icon on the bottom right to view Settings.
2) Choose Mail App and pick the default email application you want to use.
3) Tap Settings from the upper left corner to go back and hit Done to save the new changes.
It’s really all about convenience. Why take an extra step every time you want to open a file or send an email in Firefox if you don’t have to? By setting your default apps and actions, you can save yourself a bit of time.
Are you going to take a minute to choose your own default apps or actions in Firefox for opening files? Let us know!
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