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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T05:25:08+00:00

I’m writing a server running as a Windows service that by request invokes Firefox

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I’m writing a server running as a Windows service that by request invokes Firefox to generate a pdf snapshot of a webpage.

I know it is a bad idea to run a GUI program in service mode, but the server nature of my program restricts from running it in the user mode. Running a user-level ‘proxy’ also is not an option, since there might be no interactive user logged-in on the machine with the server running.

In my experiments Firefox successfully produced pdf when the service was running under a user account that was already logged-in. Obviously it didn’t work in other cases: for Local System and user accounts that weren’t logged-in. Under LocalSystem with ‘Allow service to interact with desktop’ option enabled I could see the Firefox started that reports that it’s unable to find a printer.

Since it wouldn’t be practical to require an opened user session for the pdf server to run, is there any workaround for this except running the whole thing from a virtual machine?

UPDATE: I figured that the problem wasn’t really with account permissions, but with an invisible modal dialog that FF was waiting on while running in the service mode.

However it’s still unable to create a pdf when FF is running under the LocalSystem account. FF says it can’t find a printer and I’m wondering if this is a permission that could be somehow enabled?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You might want to try a different approach where you’d include some .NET PDF library (PDFsharp is a good, open source, choice) in your project and than use that in conjuction with WebBrowser control you’d also include in your project to render the PDF.

    Don’t forget to use STAThread attribute if you try this.

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