Can't set homepage when Firefox loads
My homepage has recently changed itself, although I did not authorize this change. I want it to be msn.com, but now it displays either bing.com or the blank Firefox page seen after clicking the "Reset" button on the Options page.
I've tried entering msn.com into the Home section of the Options page, and also dragging the msn.com tab to the Home button of my browser. MSN loads when I click the Home button, but on startup, one of the other pages loads. Again, I made zero changes to my homepage settings myself. I'd greatly appreciate any advice.
Thanks in advance.
الحل المُختار
Good news! By hovering over the user.js file and taking a screen shot of its location, I was able to find the file using My Computer and then delete it. Since then, Firefox *seems* to be loading my intended homepage on each new startup. Therefore, I should be in good shape in terms of this issue.
Thanks to all for the help. Much appreciated.
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Is "When Firefox starts" set to "Show my home page"?
Do all the settings look correct in the options ?
Indeed, "Show my homepage" (msn.com) has been selected in my options. All the other settings look fine, and I've double- and triple-checked them. For some reason, though, MSN still won't load when I start Firefox. Thoughts?
Thanks for your help.
Maybe some other program has decided that you want bing.com as your hompage... have you tried reinstalling Firefox?
Do you have any extensions? (options > Add-Ons > Extensions)
You can check the target line in the Firefox desktop shortcut (right-click: Properties) to make sure that nothing is appended after the path to the Firefox program.
You can check if it has effect if you start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the Shift/Options key.
- Update: Now, instead of bing.com, Firefox loads the last page that was up the last time I closed it.
- If I reinstalled Firefox, would I have to save my favorites/bookmarks and settings so that I don't lose them?
- My two extensions are Ad Block Plus (enabled) and Norton Toolbar (disabled).
- The target line in the Properties window reads as follows: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" (including quotation marks)
- The issue does appear in Safe Mode, along with standard mode.
Any additional advice? Thanks in advance.
Update: Now, instead of bing.com, Firefox loads the last page that was up the last time I closed it.
What do you mean, the last page? If you have multiple tabs open, does it open all of them? Or the most recently opened tab?
Theres a setting for opening all the last tabs. But about reinstalling:
(This wont delete any of your personal data, like bookmarks, as those are stored in AppData.)
Hello,
Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. Please follow these steps:
Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.
- Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
- After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu and click the close button ).
- Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
- Windows:
- C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
- Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
- Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
- Windows:
- Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
- Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
- Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.
More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.
WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.
Please report back to say if this helped you!
Thank you.
You can check if you have a user.js file in the Firefox profile folder that sets the browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once pref to true.
You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
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 plain 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.
Indeed, a user.js file did show up in my Firefox profile window. I tried to delete it, but couldn't. The only options were to open, open in new tab, and so on since it was a hyperlink on my profile page. No results were found during a Windows search for "user.js", either. How else might I go about deleting this file?
When I start Firefox, the last active page that was open (the last time I closed) appears. For example, if my last active window was Google, then Google appears on startup. Same for any other page that was the last one I'd opened.
I appreciate the info about reinstalling Firefox. However, I'd like to try to delete this user.js file first to see if it fixes my problem. Hopefully it will, but if not, I'll try the reinstall.
Thanks again for the help.
If it is hyperlink are you able to right click it and find its properties ? What is it pointing at and what is that file's content ? (User js is normally a short text fil)
I also would expect it to be possible to right click and delete it. See
The forum software did pick up that you had a user.js file (see the link on the right towards the top: Question Details -> More System Information) That also indicates you are using Firefox 40 which is odd
Try to hold the Shift key when you right-click the file to see if that opens a context menu with more items.
Boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) to see if that allows to delete the user.js file.
الحل المُختار
Good news! By hovering over the user.js file and taking a screen shot of its location, I was able to find the file using My Computer and then delete it. Since then, Firefox *seems* to be loading my intended homepage on each new startup. Therefore, I should be in good shape in terms of this issue.
Thanks to all for the help. Much appreciated.
Trying adding your desired page to homeoage section under startup in General settings. Make sure you have selected when firefox opens show my homepage. Restart your browser if problem persists,let us know.