These might all be related. When your home page is hijacked and you are offered possibly bogus update alerts, I suspect an unwanted add-on may have been installed. Try this: Disable ALL nonessential or unrecognized extensions on this tab: orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Extensions category Like a link will appear above one or more extensions to restart Firefox, which you can do as the last step after making all your decisions on this tab. Next, you may want to choose a new home page, reset your search engine back to Google, and get rid of a user.js file if some external software created one. See: * [[How to set the home page]] * https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchreset/ * [[How to fix preferences that won't save]] Does that help?