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How do I stop FF from restoring previous session, I've already played with all the options I can find but nothing stops it unless I delete history each time.

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Recently, FF has started opening my last tabs when I start a fresh session. I have already checked to make sure that none of the applicable settings are enabled, such as under Options->General: When FF starts "SHOW MY HOMEPAGE" is selected. But for some reason, it opens my last session. The only way I've been able to get it to stop doing this is by having it delete my browsing history after I close the session. I don't want this since I often use my history to re-find information I need for class research. I have made certain that all my settings are the same from before FF started doing this. It only started doing this after the computer was turned off for a long weekend.

I've already searched through the Mozilla help pages and all I can find is how to restore the previous session or similar. I don't want to restore my previous session, I want it to stop restoring my previous session without having to delete my browsing history each time.

Recently, FF has started opening my last tabs when I start a fresh session. I have already checked to make sure that none of the applicable settings are enabled, such as under Options->General: When FF starts "SHOW MY HOMEPAGE" is selected. But for some reason, it opens my last session. The only way I've been able to get it to stop doing this is by having it delete my browsing history after I close the session. I don't want this since I often use my history to re-find information I need for class research. I have made certain that all my settings are the same from before FF started doing this. It only started doing this after the computer was turned off for a long weekend. I've already searched through the Mozilla help pages and all I can find is how to restore the previous session or similar. I don't want to restore my previous session, I want it to stop restoring my previous session without having to delete my browsing history each time.

Chosen solution

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

You can also try to reset Firefox:

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All Replies (7)

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If you set Firefox to open a home page when it starts up, that should fix it. If you do not want to see a particular page as the home page, you can set that to about:blank. Do that at Options > General.

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Make sure that Firefox closes properly and that there isn't a hanging Firefox or plugin-container process left in the task manager.

See:

Use "Firefox/File > Exit" (Mac: "Firefox > Quit"; Linux: "File > Quit") to close Firefox if you are currently doing that by clicking the close X on the title bar.

You can set the Integer pref browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes to 0 on the about:config page to get the about:sessionrestore page immediately with the first restart after a crash has occurred or the Task Manager was used to close Firefox.

That way you see if a sessions has crashed or otherwise didn't close properly and will allow you to deselect the tab(s) that you do not want to reopen, but will allow to reopen other tabs.

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@Finitarry: I already have a website set as my default (and startup) page. I have also tried to change and then return this option to no avail.

@Cor-el: FF is not crashing or hanging (tested using the max_resumed_crashes setting). Also, as per Task Manager, when I exit out of FF (using either the red 'x' in the upper right corner, or Firefox->Exit) the process closes down and ends entirely.

I'm sorry, folks, but neither of these proposed solutions did anything to help. FF still re-opens the last session even though all settings are telling it not to.

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Chosen Solution

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

You can also try to reset Firefox:

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@Cor-el: I created a new profile and it no longer returned to the old session. Thank you. I even tried loading addons into FF to see if I could cause it to return to the problem and so far it has stopped entirely.

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Using the instructions here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Session_Restore#Disabling_crash_recovery

I was able to turn off that feature entirely without having to create a new profile.

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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.

Modified by cor-el