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How can we stop the Preferences site from remaining open even after we quit and restart Firefox?

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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The preferences page always appears when powering up this iMac OSX 12.11.2.

Currently have this Mozilla form open. The tabs on top show "Ask a Question Mozilla Support" and the 2nd Tab shows Preferences with the settings icon on the right side.

The preferences page/tab is constantly present.

43.0.3 is the current Firefox Browser.

Many thanks for your help and service.

Jack

The preferences page always appears when powering up this iMac OSX 12.11.2. Currently have this Mozilla form open. The tabs on top show "Ask a Question Mozilla Support" and the 2nd Tab shows Preferences with the settings icon on the right side. The preferences page/tab is constantly present. 43.0.3 is the current Firefox Browser. Many thanks for your help and service. Jack

All Replies (2)

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Unfortunately, it's a little too easy to make the Preferences page one of your home tabs so that it opens with your main home page. To edit that out, you can use either of these methods:

Preferences page

Switch over to the Preferences page, and select General in the left column. Toward the top of the page, in the Startup section, check the Home Page field:

Look for a vertical bar character. As a simple example with short URLs:

https://mozilla.org/|about:preferences

The bar definitely can be hard to spot with long URLs, but when you find it, delete whichever of these you find --

|about:preferences
|about:preferences#general

-- I suggest deleting the bar last so things don't accidentally get mushed together.

Firefox will save the edit when you tab out of or click away from that box.

Don't click the "Use current pages button" or you'll have to start again.

about:config Preferences Editor

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste home and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.startup.homepage preference and remove whichever of these you see --

|about:preferences
|about:preferences#general

-- I suggest deleting the bar last so things don't accidentally get mushed together.

Success?

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Firefox uses a vertical bar ('|') to separate multiple home pages. You can check the home page setting to see if the about:preferences page is included as one of the home pages (|about:preferences#general).

This can happen if you click "Use Current Page(s)" to set the home page and about:preferences is open in a tab. You can pin the tab with the about:preferences page via the right-click context menu of the tab to prevent including about:preferences to the home page setting if you want to use this button in "Options/Preferences > General". To set a single page as the home page you can drag the globe/padlock to the toolbar Home button.