Tag: Adobe

Adobe Acrobat

Disable Make Adobe Acrobat your default PDF app on Windows

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

If you have installed Adobe Acrobat on Windows devices, you may receive regular notifications to make it the default PDF viewer on the system. This happens only if Adobe Acrobat is not set as the default PDF application on Windows.

Microsoft Edge is the default PDF viewer by default on Windows systems.

Tip: you can disable Rewrite with Copilot in Microsoft Edge to remove that annoying popup.

The notification reads: “Make Adobe Acrobat your default PDF app. Easily view, comment on PDFs, and more when you select Adobe Acrobat as your default viewer for PDF files.”.

Make Adobe Acrobat your default PDF app

Adobe’s support website has a support page about the prompt, or better, disabling the prompt. Problem is, it explains how this is done for an older version of the notification and only when launching Adobe Acrobat.

The actual Adobe Acrobat prompt has three main controls:

  • Set as default — which starts the process of making Adobe Acrobat the default PDF viewer on the Windows system.
  • The x-icon — which closes the notification.
  • The three-dots-icon — to turn off all notifications for Adobe Acrobat or open the notifications settings of the operating system.

How to disable the Adobe Acrobat prompt

Apart from making Acrobat the default PDF viewer, your best option is to activate the three-dots icon and select turn off all notifications for Adobe Acrobat.

Turn of all notifications for Adobe Acrobat

Note that Adobe suggests a different solution on the support page. The main difference is that Adobe’s provides a solution for the message when Adobe Acrobat is started, and not for the Windows notification.

Still, if you want to disable it as well, you may do so in the Windows Registry:

  1. Open the Start menu.
  2. Type regedit.exe and select Registry Editor.
  3. Confirm the UAC prompt that is shown.
  4. Go to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\AVAlert\cCheckbox.
  5. Double-click on iAppDoNotTakePDFOwnershipAtLaunchWin10.
  6. Set its value to 1.

Note: if iAppDoNotTakePDFOwnershipAtLaunchWin10 does not exist, right-click on cCheckbox and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value. Name it accordingly and set its value to 1.

Closing Words

You could also remove Adobe Acrobat, if you do not need it. On most systems, it is installed for a purpose though.