Why is Firefox always restoring old tabs when starting up, even though the options are set to New Home Page?
I have "www.yahoo.com" as my home page. I have options set to Show Home Page on startup. It will always restore my last tabs and sites. I have tried changing my options and restarting Firefox to no success. I have done troubleshooting methods found thru the community help, namely to edit the user.js file. No file is found!
Quitting Firefox via the File tab and Exit does not fix it either.
I am running Windows 10 and the latest Firefox version, all are up to date.
What do I do now?
Wšykne wótegrona (6)
There are three main reasons Firefox might restore your previous session at startup:
(1) Settings on the Options page (2) Setting in a user.js file, or possibly in an autoconfig file (3) Firefox perceives that it crashed and needs to do a crash recovery
To assess whether this is #3, you can change how Firefox starts up after a crash. Instead of restoring tabs automatically, you can set it to display a list of windows and tabs from your previous session and let you choose to load all, some, or none of them. I'm not suggesting this as the new normal, but it's the best way to figure out if the problem is #3.
Here is the setting change you want to make:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes preference and change the value from 1 to 0 (that's a zero) and click OK
Please do not change any other sessionstore preferences without researching or asking about them first.
Now when you restart Firefox after a crash, instead of an automatic restore, you should get the "This is embarrassing" screen with a checklist of tabs you can choose to restore or not restore.
Does Firefox show that screen when you start up normally?
You can check if you have a user.js file in the Firefox profile folder that sets the browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once pref to true.
You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:
- Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Directory:
Windows: Show Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
The user.js file will only be present if you or other software has created this file and normally won't be present. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: "Open with"; do not double-click). The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.
You can delete the user.js file if you didn't create this file yourself.
Okay. Still have the problem. I checked and browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once is False in about:config. I do not have a file user.js. I've checked all ways possible. Setting browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes to 0 did affect the problem as it always gave me the "This is embarrassing" screen. Put it back to a 1 and that went away, sort of. When I boot up and use Firefox the first time, I get the problem of resume old tabs or the "This is embarrassing" screen. If I close and restart Firefox, it acts normally. If I reboot, it is okay. It seems the key is turning off my pc. It is really annoying, but can live with it if I have to. Is there anything else I can try?
gkuep_1945 said
When I boot up and use Firefox the first time, I get the problem of resume old tabs or the "This is embarrassing" screen. If I close and restart Firefox, it acts normally. If I reboot, it is okay. It seems the key is turning off my pc.
Are you allowing enough time for Firefox to shut itself down before shutting down Windows? For best results, use the menu to exit Firefox -- either:
- "3-bar" menu button > "power" button
- (menu bar) File > Exit
I am using the Exit under File tab to shut down. I close Firefox about 15 minutes before closing windows and power off my pc.
You can check for issues caused by plugins.
- set plugins to "Ask to Activate" on the about:addons page ("3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Plugins)
- plugins are not affected by Firefox Safe Mode
If you use "Clear history when Firefox closes" then try to disable this feature.
- Options/Preferences -> Privacy -> Firefox will: "Use custom settings for history": [X] "Clear history when Firefox closes" -> Settings
Did you check in the Windows Task Manager that all Firefox processes are ended?