macosxhints.com – A fix for Safari 3 beta crashes on PDF links:
Safari 3 Beta kept crashing on PDF links for me. I found and removed an old Adobe PDF viewer plug-in, and all is well again. Use the Finder’s search feature to locate AdobePDFViewer.plugin (it should probably be found in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/), and delete it. Restart Safari 3, and the crashes may be gone.
My problem was more like this response:
I had a similar problem. Although Safari wouldn’t crash when opening a pdf the file would never open (Safari would just present a blank grey window). The culprit turned out to be the Acrobat 8 plugin. Removing it solved the problem.
Might also be worth invoking
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
with Safari shut down.
But I can say that moving the plugin aside (I never use Acrobat and I think that must have gotten installed by mistake at some point) solved.