Hi Andy, that's not normal. It indicates that a separate program or process is manipulating Firefox.

Some users report that immediately closing and re-opening Firefox gets rid of it, as though Firefox is starting hidden and that gets rid of the manipulated instance.

But more generally, I suggest scanning for malware: Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware.

Hopefully you'll get some more suggestions from people more familiar with how else this might happen.

You can hover the robot icon on the location bar and check what reason is shown in the tooltip (DevTools,Marionette,RemoteAgent). If the reason is DevTools then check on the about:config page whether these prefs have their default value (i.e. are not bold).

• devtools.chrome.enabled (false)
• devtools.debugger.prompt (true)
• devtools.debugger.remote-enabled (false)

You appear to have a user.js file in the profile folder, so that file could be the cause.

• /questions/1351089 Firefox address bar under remote control.

Your System Details shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts. The user.js file will only be present if you or other software has created this file and normally won't be present.

You can check its content with a text editor (right-click: "Open with"; do not double-click). The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.

You can delete the user.js file if you didn't create this file yourself.

You can use the button on the "Help -> More Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page (Root directory).

• Help -> More Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Folder/Directory:
  Windows: Open Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data