It sounds like something (an addon probably) reset your home page to something other than the Firefox Default (which it sounds like you had). You can read How to set the home page to find out how to do it. You can try just Resetting to Default, and see if that is the home page you are used to.

See also:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Preferences+are+not+saved

I'm sorry. Folks, efforts appreciated, but does anyone speak non-geek? Like, what are preferences, and where does one find them, preferably?

Is there anyone in the Firefox community that speaks on the phone? My number is (phone number removed by mod). Perhaps you could walk me through the step to reset preferences or re-build Firefox 11.0, from scratch? Whatever.

Heck, I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions. I'm just pi**ed-off that some interloper usurped my opening screen, dig it?

I'm anxious to learn, willing to listen, just to common English, however, 10-4, OK, Adam-12 and over to you, good buddy, thanks...;-) Paul

To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website.
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access the about:config page.

• Use the Filter bar at the top of the about:config page to locate a preference more easily.
• Preferences that have been modified show as bold (user set).
• Preferences can be reset to the default via the right-click context menu if they are user set
• Preferences can be changed via the right-click context menu: Modify (String or Integer) or Toggle (Boolean) or by double-clicking the line with the pref

You can use the Filter bar at the top of the about:config page and paste yourbestsearch in it to see if anything comes up.

Ok, let's try to do this step by step.

Open the Firefox menu, then press Preferences. Inside there, you should see a section for Home Page. Copy the text inside the box there (it probably starts with either http or www), paste it into a text document just for right now. Press the "Reset to Default" button. Then close and reopen Firefox. Does that look more familiar? If it does, you are set. If not, repeat the same steps, and paste the text we had copied before back into the box.