Firefox Community Forum

Why won't Firefox open any new windows? I give ir the command to open a window and yet all i get are tabs and I never click on open a tab. I have an HP probook this for windows 10 and i am also having the same problem with Chrome. I have uninstalled and reinstalled chrome and that did not fix it so it is not that. What would cause this? I have already cleared the cache cookies history browsing etc. and nothing is fixing it. PLEASE HELP.

In early June 2025 I finally ditched Windows 10 for 11 and I've been a Firefox user since practically the very beginning of Mozilla.

Now, I notice that the "Restore Previous Session" button in the drop-down of the FF menu is missing. Additionally, I discovered late in the game that Mozilla DID listen to me and gave us the ability to "name" or "tag" an entire window in the browser. This was a HUGE boon to productivity as I'm constantly toggling from window to window to tab to tab.... Now, with the most recent update this ability seems to have disappeared....

Sometimes drag functionality stops working. I can't grab a tab to move it to another position or to a new window. (Holding left click on the tab and moving the cursor does nothing). Also, re-merging the tab with another firefox window stops working. (Dragging a tab to a firefox window from another firefox window doesn't merge them. It does nothing) I can right click on the tab and select Move to move it to a new window but dragging stops working. I have to close Firefox and start it again (sometimes twice), then dragging starts working again. This happens multiple times a day. I am on Linux Mint and the version is 126.0 (64-bit). This problematic behavior has only recently began.

With multiple tabs open, the "X" close button disappears; in Safari, the "X" appears on hovering, not in FF, so I have to open the tab to close it. It's an annoyance

Hi.

This message has three sections: little background, little rant, and little help from my friends.

Little background: I use PCs since Commodore 64, and internet since dial-up modems. Apart for some curiosity attempts with other browsers, I always used Firefox. Back then you either could do some DIY or you were done for. So, I am not a noob. And yet I am not a programmer, and do not have to damn be in order to use a damn internet browser. I have no words to express how negatively the choice of changing the behavior of the X button, to make it disappear when a certain amount of tabs are open, affects my user experience with Firefox. I tolerated it version after version. Found mentions of about:config tweaks which never worked. Found mentions to css codes which seemed so complicated that I just gave up (I also don't have much capacity for such things atm). I was ready to get rid of Firefox today after all this time of being loyal. I would have, if it was not for Cor-El. (Cor-El you can put this testimonial on your website if you'll ever start a consulting business).

Little rant: I SO SO SO SO SO SO MUCH HATE bad UX Design! And the FIRST definition of bad UX Design is when a designer imposes their own tastes and preferences on the users, or makes assumptions (based on their own usage) about how users would do things. I don't give the lesser s... if Firefox's UX Designers usually only have few tabs open, or don't mind clicking on a tab to make the damn X button appear, or would gladly abandon their beloved ergonomic mouse to buy a standard one with a mid button just to close tabs, of whatever the f... was going on in their minds when they decided to remove such an ESSENTIAL FEATURE!!! This change is WRONG! Nobody asked for it, nobody wants it, nobody likes it. The X button was not disturbing anybody. WHY must we tweak some f... about:config setting or ask in this Community for some css code to get back what should have never been removed!!!??? DO YOUR JOB, which is to make OUR user experience better, OUR, not yours!!!

Little help from my friends: After quick searches over a long time where I couldn't dedicate more resources to this, I came here determined to dig deep to find a solution. And I've found a few posts with answers from Cor-El. I followed his instructions in THIS post to configure a css file with the code that he provided in THIS other post (because I thought I didn't want the delay offered by the code he provided in the former post). Problem solved.

Now a question for Cor-El: Is it just me or the solution with the two browser.tabs settings does not work? It's the first thing I tried. I went from 50/50 to 200/200 to see if size matters. But no chance. Maybe there is another setting that must be activated for these to have effect? Or was their effect on the X button removed in newer Firefox versions (like the UX Destroyers really hate us)? Btw, I wanted to see how the delay thing would work, so I tried the code you gave in the first post, and it didn't have any effect. Whereas the code you modified for a guy in THIS post works perfectly. What could be the reason?

And 2 requests: - can you make some guide or pinned post about this, where you put together the info you gave in different posts? Something with your super easy instructions how to create a css file, and the two codes (with and without delay). And if the browser.tabs solution can still work, that too. All info in one single place, easy to find. - can you point me to a (possibly ADHS friendly) resource to more css codes for other useful tweaks, and to an explanation of what all about:config settings do? I like to tweak things to my needs. But I get overwhelmed if I have to read through tons of material. Thanks :)

Bonus Material, Little Rant part 2: It's good and nice that people help each other and I am thankful, but it does not need to come to this. Sure, I've read that the (ridiculous) reason behind the choice of making the X button disappear was to avoid accidental closure of tabs. But WHY taking for granted that we are some !diots who can't even use a mouse properly? And even if it happens once, we can still go to the damn "recently closed tabs"! But no, they had to remove the X button for all of us, to prevent a bunch of !%#@! from maybe sometime accidentally closing a tab. Why not just adding an option in the settings (NOT in some hidden "about:config") to let us choose if we want to have the damn button or not? Btw, a lot of these about:config tweaks are really useful and not dangerous at all and should imo be included in the normal settings. Keeping things simple and tidy does NOT mean reducing options. Unless you're Apple.

Please God-zilla let these [censored content] UX Designers read this post.

Amen and happy new Xear.

Hello, sadly I have the problem since a few days that firefox opens a new tab with the same error every time I google something or click on a new page/subpage etc. The URL on the error page is all the time "https://0.0.0.1/" mentention of course a page loading error. I don't know why firefox keeps oppening new tabs with this URL. I allrady tried to use the clearing function and even reinstalled the software, nothing worked. Maybe somebody can help me solving this problem, it is very annoying to have multiple new error-tabs per minute in a normal work flow. Thanks and best regards, Thomas

PROSZĘ zróbcie czułość rozwijania bocznego panelu. Nie wiem czy to tylko w ostatnim czasie ale bardzo ciężko najechać na coś kursorem blisko bocznego panelu ponieważ ten odrazu się rozwija. Jestem zadowolony z tej formy kart przeglądarek więc chciałbym przy niej pozostać, natomiast ta czułość rozwijania kiedy kursor myszki jest stosunkowo daleko jest irytująca i znacząco utrudnia korzystanie z przeglądarki.

Hello, I used to have Microsoft Teams as a pinned tab (in fact I think it was my first pinned tab), which I no longer need as I now have the Teams app on my computer. I have tried unpinning the Teams tab but whenever I close & reopen Firefox, it reappears - it doesn't show up initially, but will pop up 5-10 seconds after Firefox starts (my other pinned tabs show up straight away) - so I have to close it each time. Not a big issue I know but kinda annoying - any suggestions/solutions?

As long as I have an incognito window open, Firefox will reopen old tabs everytime I open a new "regular" window, even if "Open previous windows and tabs" is unchecked.

Hi,

I have the following problem: Windows 7 crashed after coming back from standby. When I restarted Firefox it restored a 3-month-old session. The sessionstore.jsonlz4 file was missing in the profile folder. I searched for a backup in the sessionstore-backups folder; unfortunately all were too old. Windows Restore was not running on my computer.

Using EaseUS Data Recovery I found a recovery.baklz4 file from 10 days ago, tried renaming it etc. but Firefox won't use it for recovering. It is probably corrupt ...

I used https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html but I get an error saying: Session history file contents could not be read?

Is there any way to repair the file or extract the URLs to use them manually?

Or any other solution is very welcome! Thank you very much!

ctrl+w stopped working. I can no longer close tabs in firefox using this shortcut. I have tried using the shortcut add-on but no matter what combination i use with ctrl+* nothing will close tabs. i know i can use ctrl+F4 but this is very annoying. What happened and is anyone else having this issue??

Any ideas would be so helpful. Did I turn off something on windows??

With vertical tabs and expand on hover, clicking on the X box rarely closes the tab. Sometimes I have success if the pointer is on the left or right line of the box. Not having luck on the center of the box. Has been true for several weeks. With hover off, clicking the X works fine. I am running Windows 11.

This is the procedure I followed:

Close firefox

Copy previous.jsonlz4 file to the main level in the profile

It has all the tabs i used to have in it because I made a backup a few days ago

Rename the file to sessionstore.jsonlz4

restart firefox

I get the same single tab I had before i did this

when i go to history tabs, all that is there is the single tab i currently have

Appreciate your help/gary

Up until Firefox 116, Reopen Closed Tab (Ctrl+Shift+T) would reopen closed tabs, and Reopen Closed Window (Ctrl+Shift+N) would reopen closed windows. There was a clear bifurcation, so I could freely close windows and not worry about it polluting my tab history in another window.

The latest change has thrown out that advantage, and now Reopen Closed Tab reopens both tabs and windows, while Reopen Closed Window still just reopens windows. This makes the later essentially useless and the former much more difficult to use for me.

I assume this was done to just continue copying Chrome in all respects since that's how it handles it, but the changelog just vaguely states, "This change is in anticipation of upcoming changes to recently closed tabs."

Does anyone know if there's a setting to separate the two functions again?

I regularly use a website which intercepts command-option-up and command-option-down for its own navigation. This is a central part of my workflow with this website, and without it it becomes completely unusable.

After updating to Firefox 140.0.4, these shortcuts are now used by the browser to switch tabs. I have not found any way to configure this. Am I missing some obscure way to do this or is this just impossible?

I imagine this change was made to support vertical tabs, but I'm not using those, so the command-option-left and command-option-right shortcuts make more sense for my horizontal setup. (I don't use those shortcuts either, though- I use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab!)

I have many tabs open at the same time and I'm noticing tabs from Urban Dictionary in particular are automatically changing to suspicious sites, quite a few porn sites in fact.

Is this something Urban Dictionary is doing to direct viewers to sponsors or is there a bug in my FF browser?