Firefox Community Forum

Firefox asked how i wanted to open documents and I said with Word and it is doing what I asked. I want to open it in PDF or something else because they dont open in word.

A week ago I got a BSOD that ruined settings of most of my extensions and most likely some of Firefox's settings too (at least it erased my custom findbar.matchdiacritics value, but probably not just that). After that I moved Firefox's folder and re-installed it. I also created a new profile. The 2 profiles are synced. Because of that, the new profile got (almost) all the extensions from the old one automatically. Then, I decided to do a clean install of those extensions (the reason why is a story for another ticket). So, while both profiles were opened, I removed one extension in the new profile, waited for a bit and checked the old one to see if it got removed from there too. At first it wasn't, so I thought they are not synced (anymore). Yeah, sure, but once I removed all extensions from the new one, the old one woke up and removed all extensions from there too. Great! Awesome! Loved it wholeheartedly! It really had to wait until I removed them all, didn't it? Anyway, I had a backup of my old profile, so I restored my extensions and their settings on both profiles eventually. So now I have clean installs of Firefox and extensions. Back to the issue. I can't load Steam pages (at least store.steampowered and steamcommunity) normally anymore. They load forever, and if the blue dot eventually stops moving (after an insane amount of time), it's either a plain white screen, or badly loaded page with most images missing.

• Edge loads them just fine
• Steam client loads them just fine.
• If I turn on VPN plugin (I use Browsec), then it works. It's like that in both old and new profile. That's why I mentioned that funny little story before.
• Tried Troubleshoot Mode, didn't help.
• Tried to selectively disable some extensions, same.
• Obviously tried to remove cookies, Ctrl + F5 and whatnot. Btw, if I clean everything and try to load it, then it's (most likely?) a white page, but if I turn the VPN on and load it first, and then turn it off and reload it, then it will look a bit better, but still will load forever with some media missing. (Which kinda make sense since something was already cached.)
• Tried to change proxy settings from “Use system proxy settings” to “No proxy” and “Auto-detect proxy settings for this network”, nah-ah.
• Tried to disable DNS in Firefox's settings, no siree.
• The console throws different warning and errors every time (that are probably even unrelated). Or none at all.
• Probably tried something I already forgot about.

Also, it seems the culprit is actually Akamai (it's where the Steam stores its media) or whatever is preventing reaching it. Because it often shows something like “Waiting for community.akamai.steamstatic.com...” in the status bar for a long time. It seems like the problem is within Firefox's settings, and it also looks like settings aren't synced across profiles (or at least some aren't, I definitely had to configure them on the new profile manually). Anyway, I am out of ideas and my butthurt thrust is about to deliver me to Uranus. Thanks for your attention!

microsoft edge has AGAIN fouled up my entire system; nothing newsworthy there. i managed to get my 3 profiles running again, but my "tabs groups" feature is gone and i only have the tabs i put in available.

can anyone tell me how to get my firefox tab groups working again?

i do a lot of research online and had dozens of groups and hundreds of tabs. these are now not showing up at all.

is there some way to go back to a working firefox tab groups or which file they would be in, etc.?

Thanks for any help! Wolfgang [edited email from public]

There are many Recommended extensions that are doing so very shady things (collecting user data that shouldn't be necessary for the task the extension is doing, storing user data, sharing data with less then trustworthy 3rd parties, using bullying tactics to get people to subscribe and so on). Many of these extensions change their privacy policies or their monetization practices after you've given them a Recommended badge and you then blissfully continue to suggest the extension after these changes.

I am having trouble with Firefox that's very odd: the tabs keep overlapping and I am not able to click on links.

It keeps happening randomly and I have no idea why!

I've attached a screen grab so you can see what I mean.

When this happens I have to close down the tabs in question and then reopen them.

Never had this issue before.

I don't remember signing up for Microsoft OR Mozilla. but I've been using Firefox for years. I have Microsoft, which may be [edited] @gmail.com, as I changed it from that to [edited] @gmail.com years ago, and haven't logged in for years.

I keep getting what appears to be notification (of news items?) popping up in the lower right hand corner of my screen. Is this a function of Firefox and if so can I disable it?

Amazon (either UK or US) has suddenly stopped loading properly on Firefox - there's no main top menu or header, instead there's a text list down the LHS (see screenshots). This first happened yesterday (14 Sept 2025) and it's still the same today. It works OK on MS Edge, so it looks like the've changed something which Firefox no longer recognises.

after reinstalling the OS, Firefox stopped synchronizing most of the data. Bookmarks were not transferred, and passwords and extensions were transferred less than half

Is Firefox blocking my access to certain websites? for example www.rt.com I'm able to access using a VPN which suggests Firefox is restricting my access.