I want to turn off tabs for Preview especially. Following these instructions, I went to Dock and set “Prefer tabs when opening documents” to Manually – yet PDF documents keep opening up in new tabs in Preview when I open files I download from Chrome, open files from the terminal, or even if I click on them from the Finder. Help?
MacOS High Sierra: disable tabs for all apps
high sierramacospreviewtabs
Related Solutions
Auto-opening a downloaded file from a browser is done on pretty much a browser-to-browser basis. Since you asked about Chrome, here's the relevant blurb from Google's Docs:
Automatically open certain types of files
If you want certain types of files to always open after they're done downloading, click the arrow next to the file button in the downloads bar and select Always open files of this type. To prevent potentially malicious files from automatically downloading to your computer, this option isn't available for executable filetypes, such as those with .exe, .dll, or .bat extensions (for Windows), and .dmg extensions (for Mac).
Personally, these features weren't visible when I tried it, but then I hardly use Chrome other than for the odd web site test.
To stop only Preview from doing this open up Terminal.app and enter:
defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
To re-enable this at any time enter:
defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool true
If you want to turn off the resume-on-load feature for all applications you can go to System Preferences -> General and at the bottom of the screen uncheck the option Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps to prevent any application from doing this.
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Best Answer
Manually didn't work for me either. Only after I choose "In Full Screen Only", then toggled back to "Manually" did it do so.
Also, make sure in System Preferences > General you don't have "Close windows when quitting an app" checked, as this may result in previously tabbed PDF's opening together.