A bug report was created for that long ago. Never acted on.

Hi, by Top Sites, do you mean the tiles on the Firefox Home / new tab page?

When Firefox performs a Refresh, your old profile folder is moved to your desktop into a folder named Old Firefox Data. Can you find that folder?

The prefs.js file stores custom preferences, and includes the list of Top Sites. This aspect of the file is hard to read -- and please do not double-click any .js files because Windows will execute them as a system script -- so we'll need to provide more guidance, but I have a question first:

What were the reasons for running a Refresh?

That would affect what we suggest copying over from the old folder (in other words, we don't want to bring back the problem if we can avoid it).

Oh, I see that you had tab crashes, and that was the reason for the Refresh. We should not bring back the entire prefs.js file in that case. We'll need to figure out the easiest method to carefully transfer one (giant) chunk of data from the old file to your current setup, or if you prefer, we could suggest a method to extract the URLs only.

Are you comfortable with viewing messy files, and maybe downloading a more advanced text editor to help with the project?

jscher

thanks for the reply I shouldnt have to sort out messy files (nor should anyone) searching around this has been reported many many times and STILL its an issue. Tabs crashing GAH not responding. even in safe mode this happens. Ive done all that is expected of me on the net, malware, scf/scannow dism restore health...you name i done it. Grrrrr firefox now 'not responding' Brave...here i come