Safari downloads PDFs instead of opening them

[Greystorm]

When I click a PDF link in Safari it downloads the file to my Downloads folder and then opens it in Preview.

According to the online help it is supposed to open the PDF in the Safari window. This is the behaviour that I want but I can't make it do that. It always wants to download the file first and then automatically open it in Preview.

Is this normal behaviour? Is the help system wrong? How do I get it to open PDFs in Safari without downloading them to my Downloads. Nine times out of ten I just want to look at a PDF, not save a copy of it locally.

Edit: This is what help says about viewing PDFs.

Viewing PDF files
When you click a link for a PDF file, Safari displays it in your browser window and provides a toolbar to help you view the file.

 

[richard.mac]

what links are you clicking? try these http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-au&q=filetype:pdf&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

 

[DoFoT9]

have you tried:
1)right click - "open in new window"
2)right click - "open in new tab"

??

 

[ltldrummerboy]

This sounds like it could be a permissions problem. Repair them in Disk Utility and see what happens when you're done. Do you have a download manager that's set to intercept PDFs? Speed Download or Leech?

 

[DoFoT9]

This sounds like it could be a permissions problem. Repair them in Disk Utility and see what happens when you're done. Do you have a download manager that's set to intercept PDFs? Speed Download or Leech?

or adobe acrobat PDF reader?

 

[Greystorm]

what links are you clicking? try these http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-au&q=filetype:pdf&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Hmm. So direct links to PDFs open in Safari from the google search result.

But this link http://www.geocities.com/homes4aussies/080708paper.pdf will do a download and then open in Preview.

 

[Greystorm]

I've tried a few of the PDFs found with google now and it's working as advertised on the tin.

It looks like it's just some websites (the two I was using at the time) will bypass this behaviour somehow.

Thanks everyone for your quick replies and assistance.

The community rocks!

 

[ltldrummerboy]

It did the same for me in Firefox and Safari. That's the first PDF I've seen do that.

 

[DoFoT9]

Hmm. So direct links to PDFs open in Safari from the google search result.

But this link http://www.geocities.com/homes4aussies/080708paper.pdf will do a download and then open in Preview.

thats so odd, the 3rd link "Invited submission to Affordable Rent inquiry" taken from http://www.geocities.com/homes4aussies/ also does it too. i had a look at the source code, it looks normal as anything! must be a geocities thing.

table width=520 height=28 border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0><tr valign="top">
	<td><a href="http://www.geocities.com/homes4aussies/h4a081104.pdf"><b><font face="Helvetica" size="+1"><span style="font-size:18">Paper - Prices falling faster than US at same stage of cycle!!</span></font></b></a></td>
</tr>