Thanks anyway, and as I said in another message in this thread:
Seeing that this is related to an in-situ release upgrade and adding the downgrade didn’t fix it, there may be some files in your $XDG_(CONFIG|DATA|STATE)_(HOME|DIRS) and or perhaps something in $XDG_CACHE_HOME(?). You could try to purge the package and then install it afresh, but that only fixes things when there is actual config data in /etc that’s causing this, which I doubt exists in this case, so some hunting for said files in $XDG_(CONFIG|DATA|STATE)_HOME might be required. But don’t just delete them, if you can find them, because they could help in investigating what went wrong in the upgrade path.
Or just test with a clean new user account?
I also start to think it is something in my configuration, and something I do in all systems because I see this so far in all the systems I updated. I think it is just me because the bug report has not been confirmed by anybody else (nobody clicked “I’m affected”).
@peterwhite23 good idea trying in a clean install, if I have time I will install in a VM and check if I see this or not. I presume it will not show up, as I said, I haven’t seen any other report of this so far.
Maybe it’s some kind of permissions issue. I had funny stuff happening when I overdid it with a restrictive UMASK of 027 in /etc/login.defs, for instance. That, in itself, shouldn’t cause issues with processes running in the regular desktop user account, but led to some files created in a sudo context being inaccessible to normal users altogether. I had also managed to get files and directories owned by root in my unprivileged user’s XDG_* directories by some careless sudo usage, with directory trees which weren’t even accessible.
Maybe just a clean new user profile for a start? That should exclude issues with a not exactly clean user profile, unless it’s because of some global setting for all users.
I have performed now two more experiments and in both I could reproduce what I report in this thread: Instead of opening directly the PDF with the default system app, Firefox opens a dialog to choose among applications with the default app highlighted as the preferred application.
Experiment 1: Create a new user, this is reproduced.
Experiment 2: Install cleanly Ubuntu 26.04 in a virtual machine, this is reproduced.
Before that, in one of my systems, I also could reproduce this with Chromium, to make sure this is not something specific of Firefox.
I’m seeing this in the three systems that I upgraded in situ from 25.10 to 26.04.
Still wondering why nobody else sees this and my bug report still is unconfirmed in Launchpad.
Maybe it is something you do on your systems? While reading the thread about “to su or not to su”, this warning on the Arch Wiki was mentioned. If you have run some apps as root, chances are that it introduced permissions issues in your regular user’s $HOME, including the config directories/files.
The two experiments above IMHO preclude that it is something I do with my systems. Especially a clean install of completely default Ubuntu 16.04 on a VM, I can reproduce this perfectly there.
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Yeah, sorry for the noise; I should have read more carefully. 
I have the same issue on my PC as well as my laptop. On both systems I was using evince as default PDF viewer and updated the release from 25.10 to 26.04 now.
Welcome @mhaefele86 and thanks for your message.
If you want, you can mark in the bug report (the link is in message 9 of this thread) that you are also affected, this will confirm the bug.
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