Sounds that you experience this bug that happens when you are running Firefox in Private Browsing mode and you open links in a new window.

• bug 1166066 - Firefox 38 regression: link in private window with target="_blank" opens window with no tabs/toolbars/menus

Possible workarounds: (1) use Options/Preferences > General: "Open new windows in a new tab instead" (2) Shift+click links to open in a new window with the standard features or use the right-click context menu.

My computer settings have the check by Open new windows. When I hold down the shift key and click on the option that pops up another window, this still does not work.

Yeah, I'm getting tired of right clicking on links, and sometimes you just can't. Like, my online brokerage opens up report pages in a new window automatically, and I can't see the information because there's no slider bars. It's not the PC, it's happening on both my computers after a recent Firefox update. I don't see any place in program settings that would affect this. Someone said to use tabs, but I HATE tabs.

For you tab-haters, there's another option...

To recap, there is a bug in Firefox 38 with this combination of circumstances:

(1) You are viewing a page in a private browsing window (2) Tabbed browsing is turned off (3) You click a link which launches the link in a new window (because the site coded the link with target="_blank")

The new window opens as a dialog/popup without menus, toolbar, scroll bars, etc.

Work on this bug is in process, and these are the currently known workarounds so you can keep using private browsing windows -- any one of them will work around the bug:

(1) Use tabbed browsing (this is a checkbox under Preferences > General > "Open new windows in a new tab instead");

(2) Shift+click links to open them in a new window with the standard features; or

(3) Change a bunch of hidden settings as explained below -- this will not require you to make any changes to how you use Firefox, but you might occasionally need to enlarge some small pop-up windows that were sized for a window with no toolbars displayed.

For #3, here are the steps:

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

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

(C) For every preference that starts with dom.disable_window_open_feature. if it is not "true", double-click it to switch it to true.

You may find that you prefer this anyway, since sites can no longer strip these features out of pop-up windows.