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When I open firefox previously viewed tabs keep opening instead of the home page and I can't get rid of them

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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All I can do is minimise each tab, open my home page from favourites, and then press the red X in the minimised box.

All I can do is minimise each tab, open my home page from favourites, and then press the red X in the minimised box.

All Replies (3)

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Type about:preferences#general<enter> in the address bar.

There are two settings;

  • When Firefox Starts

When the browser is started, what do you want to display. Many of us choose Show My Home Page.

  • Home Page

When a new page is opened, what do you want displayed.

  1. Use Current Page. Use what ever page(s) are open at that time.
  2. Use Bookmark
  3. Restore To Default. about:home shows a Mozilla home page with tools.

You can use any of these that you wish;

about:home (Firefox default home page), about:newtab (shows the sites most visited), about:blank (a blank page),

or you can enter any web page or about: page you want.

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Also, please investigate whether you have a user.js file as described in this article: How to fix preferences that won't save. Some software may create such a file and it may contain an override that instructs Firefox to restore your previous session.

Did you see anything like that?

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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 currently used Firefox profile folder:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)

Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts. The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there.

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.