Firefox is opening all my previous tabs on a new session when this is not required
Hi,
I'm using Firefox 32.0.3 under Windows 8.1.
In Tools -> Options -> General -> Startup, I've set Firefox to open my home page when it starts. However, it insists on opening all the tabs from my previous session on startup.
In case this was due to Firefox never closing properly, I set browser.sessionrestore.resume_from_crash to false, which didn't make any difference.
Do any of you fine educated chaps have any ideas?
Chosen solution
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 currently used Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.
The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: Open with) if you didn't create this file yourself.
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.
Note that Windows hides some file extensions by default. Among them are .html and .ini and .js and .txt, so you may only see file name without file extension. You can see the real file type (file extension) in the properties of the file via the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (6)
May be you have changed your homepage. Configure it:
1. Click the menu button and choose Options. 2. Select the General panel. 3. From the When Firefox starts drop-down, select "Show my homepage". Click OK to close the Options window .
Chosen Solution
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 currently used Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.
The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: Open with) if you didn't create this file yourself.
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.
Note that Windows hides some file extensions by default. Among them are .html and .ini and .js and .txt, so you may only see file name without file extension. You can see the real file type (file extension) in the properties of the file via the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.
Modified by cor-el
Thanks, updating my user.js file so that browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once was set to false worked perfectly.
Bizarrely, the line setting the aforementioned variable to true was actually in the user.js file not once, but twice - not sure how it ended up in there.
You should remove the user.js file instead of editing the pref to false. This user.js file shouldn't be there. The browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once pref is meant for special cases like installing an extension or an update that needs a restart of Firefox. If you force the pref to false via a user.js file then you will lose open tabs on the restart.
How do I remove the user .js file?
You can delete the file or move the file or rename the file or move to a different folder if you want to keep it, but there shouldn't be a reason to do that if you haven't created the file yourself.