How can I start Firefox and open new tabs with specific URLs?

Hi Sam, you are seeing two different settings, and that is why it feels inconsistent. For startup, go to Settings, then Home. Under New windows and tabs, set When Firefox starts to Homepage, then put your pages in the Homepage field, separated by a vertical bar, with no spaces. Each page should then open in its own tab when Firefox starts, and the same pages will open when you click the Home button. New tabs are separate: in current Firefox, a new tab can only be set to the Firefox Home page or a blank page, so there is no built-in setting for a custom new-tab page. If you want a quick way to open your usual pages together, save them as bookmarks in one folder and use Open All in Tabs from that folder. I hope that helps to separate the startup behaviour from the new-tab behaviour.

Previously, I could set a URL for startup and for new tabs.

Hi Sam, setting your own home page address (see How to set the home page) usually takes care of startup, too. Is it possible that Firefox is set to restore previous session windows and tabs at startup? That is in Settings just above where you set the home page. You could try turning it on and off to shake the dust off that setting (or in other words, to reset the internal value).

Firefox new tabs -- the page shown in a new tab when you click the + button on the tab bar or press Ctrl+T -- work quite differently. There hasn't been a built-in "choose any URL" new tab setting since Firefox 40. Because that setting was constantly hijacked by malware, Firefox 41 switched to using an add-on to set your new tab page. I think "New Tab Override" is the most widely used and recommended: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/

Thanks to both of you for the quick responses!

For the record, I am using Firefox version 159.

"When Firefox starts" is the exact option I need, but it is not there.. I did a search for "when" in settings. There were many instances of the word, but none relating to Firefox starting. I will add a screenshot of my startup settings. Startup is not set to open previous windows and tabs. Shaking the dust off of that setting didn't help.

Thanks for referring me to the new tab add-on. That will fix that!

Sam

The Settings page was heavily revised in a recent version, so now there is the separate checkbox for "Open previous windows and tabs". That is supposed to have this effect:

• Checked: restore your previous session
• Unchecked: start with the "New windows" page

Since it doesn't seem to be working, let's check under the covers:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste browser.startup.page and pause while the list is filtered

(3) The available values for this preference are:

• 1 => use the "New windows" page
• 3 => restore previous session
• 0 => blank page
• 2 => last visited page in previous session

Is yours set to 1? If not, you should be able to reset to 1 by click the left-arching reset arrow at the right end of the row, or you can edit it by hand.

browser.startup.page is already set to 1. Setting it to 3 doesn't change anything, it just starts with the Firefox Home page.

Let me say that I don't want to start Firefox with the previous session. I often have lots of miscellaneous tabs from browsing and I don't want all of that to come up again. I want to specify one URL for startup and new tabs . If I want to start with more than one URL, I would like to be able to specify them. (If I have 20 or more tabs open, it's easier to just close and restart the browser rather than go through and close each tab separately.)

Obviously, people might want the option to start with one URL and then have new tabs go to another, so separate settings are needed.

Thanks again,

What is your New Window page set to - you have your Custom URL(s) in there but Firefox is ignoring it?

It is a pointer to a local file on my computer. I wrote an html page that contains my "favorites" pointers. I have dozens of links to pages that I use regularly. With a local file, the links are always in the same location, and I have associated links grouped on the page. This is better than a favorites bar on any browser, since I format it as I like and it doesn't change when a browser update changes things.

I have that URL set as the "Homepage". I works when I click on the home icon. It does not work on startup or with new tabs.

I tested with a local file and it worked! So I don't think the fact that it's a local file is causing the problem of Firefox not displaying the file.

Are you sure Firefox is shutting down properly, and not doing an automatic crash recovery? As a diagnostic, you can turn off automatic crash recovery and have Firefox present the option to recover or start a new session. Here's how:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the preference to display an editing field, and change the value to 0 then press Enter or click the purple check mark button to save the change.

(Actually, I use that setting myself to avoid possibly repeatedly loading a page that crashes the browser. I guess that's less of a concern in recent years now that individual tabs can crash without taking down the whole browser.)

I changes the value to 0 but nothing changed.

1. Firefox does display my local file when I click the home icon.

2. There is no option to startup Firefox with a specific URL, so the only option is to start with the standard Firefox home page.

You said that the settings pages were heavily modified lately, so it seems like the startup URL option just got lost.

Thanks again for your help.

In my test, I got the local page at startup with these settings:

I'm really puzzled why you aren't getting yours.

Could you check your desktop shortcut or pinned taskbar shortcut:

• right-click > Properties (on the Taskbar, you might need to right-click the pinned shortcut, then right-click Firefox and then right-click Properties)
• Windows should select the Shortcut tab but, if it doesn't switch to the Shortcut tab
• Check the Target line to see whether it has any parameters after the standard command
  "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

That's it!

The shortcut on the task bar was the dark blue icon and it brought up a Firefox private Window. I opened C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe. That came up with my local home page as desired.

I looked under the Fs in the start menu and there were three Firefox shortcuts, with the properties listed below. I pinned the first one to the task bar and that solves everything!

Many thanks for your help!

Sam

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\private_browsing.exe"

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" "-taskbar-tab" "d497996f-9bd5-41ad-87b5-c742f20b1e49" "-new-window" "https://www.firefox.com" "-profile" "C:\Users\Sam\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\mdj2oudp.default-release" "-container" "0"

Sam, thank you for your perseverance. It sometimes seems that there are too many ways to break Firefox and it's always the last thing you check. But we got there.