Thanks for all your suggestions, but I have succeeded in reverting to Firefox version 60.0.2. I hope to be able to use it until Mozilla makes version 61 work for all potential users. Background: When I logged on to my Windows 7 laptop this morning (June 27, 2018) and opened my home page (Google News) I was still running Firefox (version 61.0). In Google News the font in the left-hand region remained garbled and difficult to read. When I clicked on any article a new tab opened, but the page was empty- nothing was displayed. I opened Gmail in version 61, but it remained difficult to use: [None of the "buttons" in the region (or row) above the emails had any identification and none were active- when I tried to click on any one of them it did nothing. The small "button" in the upper right-hand region (labeled "Google apps") was dead- it did nothing. I was unable to either put a check in the box to the left of any email, or change the color or symbol in any of the "starred" symbols to the left of any email.] So I searched for how I might be able to downgrade Firefox to the version I had been using [60.0.2 (64-bit)]. I found a website https://www.wikihow.com/Downgrade-Firefox that explained how to do this. I followed their instructions and located a website https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/r.../en-US/ that allowed me to download the setup file for Firefox version 60.0. I confirmed while I was still in version 61 that I had selected the option in "Tools / Options / General / Firefox Updates / Allow Firefox to: Never check for updates (not recommended)", and that I had unchecked both the box next to "Use a background service to install updates" and the box next to "Automatically update search engines". After running the downloaded setup file for version 60, I am again using the Firefox that worked for me- version 60.0.2 (64-bit). And as of now (about 8 am on June 27) Firefox has NOT "automatically upgraded itself" to the newer (but undesirable for me) version 61. Thanks again, Ron

Just to provide context, this works around some connection issues on Google sites affecting users of Avast and AVG who have the "Web Shield" feature enabled:

Muldercs said

This is what I did in address bar type about:config
Click I accept
Then in search bar at top type TLS
Then from remaining lines look for line that reads
security.tls.version.max
Change the number on that line from a 4 to a 3
All should now work

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it if/when I decide to upgrade to version 61.

Do not follow that instruction, it will put your computer in a less secure state.

Thanks, Tyler, for your advice about the earlier post. I've already taken the "grain of salt".