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old tabs re opening

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I have Firefox 73.0 Windows 10. Lately multiple old tabs [ 20-30 ] are re opening in Firefox. Some of these go back to Sept/Oct 2019.Too often these just show up across the top of my screen.....and i spend too much time deleting them one at a time. This is very strange....can you please help? Thanks!

I have Firefox 73.0 Windows 10. Lately multiple old tabs [ 20-30 ] are re opening in Firefox. Some of these go back to Sept/Oct 2019.Too often these just show up across the top of my screen.....and i spend too much time deleting them one at a time. This is very strange....can you please help? Thanks!

Chosen solution

Hmm, forgot to mention:

Firefox can save multiple tabs as your home page, so if you use a custom home page instead of the built-in home page, please check that setting to see whether those old tabs somehow got saved there.

How to set the home page

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Hi Ronald, that is strange. Have you noticed any other changes in your Firefox, such as toolbar rearrangement, add-on changes, or missing bookmarks or history?

You could consider hiding the old session history files so Firefox doesn't restore them. Here's how:

Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either

  • "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the first table on the page, click the "Open Folder" button. That should launch a File Explorer window listing the contents of your profile folder.

Double-click into the sessionstore-backups folder. Two of these are live files for your current session; the others can be removed (either saved to a different location for possible future use, or deleted):

Do not remove:

  • recovery.jsonlz4: the windows and tabs in your currently live Firefox session (or, if Firefox crashed at the last shutdown and is still closed, your last session)
  • recovery.baklz4: a backup copy of recovery.jsonlz4 (15 second lag, approximately)

Okay to remove:

  • previous.jsonlz4: the windows and tabs in your last Firefox session
  • upgrade.jsonlz4-build_id: the windows and tabs in the Firefox session that was live at the time of your last update
  • any other files

Hopefully with those gone, Firefox won't be able to dig up old tabs again.

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You may have corrupt sessionstore [v56] sessionstore.jsonlz4 file(s). Delete all sessionstore* files and the sessionstore-backups folder.

Type about:support<enter> in the address bar.

Under the page logo on the left side, you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Folder. To its right press the button Show Folder. This will open your file browser to the current Firefox profile. Now Close Firefox.

Windows: Show Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder

Linux: Under the page logo on the left side, you will see Application Basics. Under this find Profile Directory. To its right press the button Open Directory.

Locate the above file. Then rename or delete it. Restart Firefox.


Don't delete the files if you need to rescue any data from them, just move them out of the profile folder to some location where Firefox doesn't look for them. You can try to read out their contents using this tool:

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Chosen Solution

Hmm, forgot to mention:

Firefox can save multiple tabs as your home page, so if you use a custom home page instead of the built-in home page, please check that setting to see whether those old tabs somehow got saved there.

How to set the home page