Firefox Community Forum

I rebooted my laptop with both firefox windows I had open and possibly a private window too, then rebooted again without touching firefox, and now I can only restore one of the two windows. I checked my recently closed windows in history and there was nothing there at all. Is there anything I can do at all to restore that other window or is it just gone for good now?

Recently, when I copy and paste an error message to the search box in Firefox and the first word contains a ':', such as when searching for this error message - "MESA-LOADER: failed to open dri: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gbm/dri_gbm.so: cannot open shared object file" - I get the "Open the mesa-loader link with System Handler?" prompt (see screenshot).

I used to be able to copy and paste such an error before into the search box and it would just work but now the browser defaults to thinking you are entering a URL. This could be because when I start typing in the search box, it immediately relocates what I'm typing to the address bar. Maybe this is the behaviour I need to disable? But how and why is it the default?

Help!

Browser details

$ > snap info firefox name: firefox summary: Mozilla Firefox web browser publisher: Mozilla✓ store-url: https://snapcraft.io/firefox contact: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla license: unset description: |

 Firefox is a powerful, extensible web browser with support for modern web application
 technologies.

commands:

 - firefox
 - firefox.geckodriver

snap-id: 3wdHCAVyZEmYsCMFDE9qt92UV8rC8Wdk tracking: latest/stable/ubuntu-24.04 refresh-date: 19 days ago, at 13:56 AEDT channels:

 latest/stable:    144.0.2-1    2025-10-29 (7177) 261MB -
 latest/candidate: 145.0-1      2025-11-04 (7242) 262MB -
 latest/beta:      145.0b9-1    2025-10-31 (7213) 262MB -
 latest/edge:      146.0a1      2025-11-05 (7250) 298MB -
 esr/stable:       140.4.0esr-2 2025-10-14 (7023) 258MB -
 esr/candidate:    140.5.0esr-1 2025-11-05 (7236) 258MB -
 esr/beta:         ↑                                    
 esr/edge:         ↑                                    

installed: 144.0-2 (7084) 261MB -

OS Details

PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS" NAME="Ubuntu" VERSION_ID="24.04" VERSION="24.04.3 LTS (Noble Numbat)" VERSION_CODENAME=noble ID=ubuntu ID_LIKE=debian HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/" SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/" PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy" UBUNTU_CODENAME=noble LOGO=ubuntu-logo

Firefox used to save unknown files according to the save files setting. i.e. ask where to save files. Now if opens unknown files as text in a new tab.

How can the correct behavior be restored?

Alternately, can the Linux snap be fixed to allow saving of new file types? {The procedure shown in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-firefox-behavior-when-open-file is not present in the firefox 141 snap.

Hello all!

I've started having an issue in the last few days, with apparently two separate Firefox installs. A few days ago I was greeted by a fresh, blank install of Firefox and had to set everything up and sign in as I usually would on a fresh system install. Today, however, I somehow managed to launch both of them at once (I don't know how, as I just use the UI shortcut). After closing both fully, I can now only start the "old" one via the shortcut.

OS: Bluefin / Fedora 42.20, Gnome 48.6

According to the list of flatpaks, only one is installed. Unfortunately that's roughly where my knowledge of Linux ends, so I can't troubleshoot this further. Help will be apprecciated, as I don't want to roll a die on which of these will start up every time I reboot.