Hi

Easiest to avoid such issues is to open the result in a new tab, that allows to close the tab to go back to the Firefox Home page.

You can hold down the left mouse button on the back button or right-click to open the tab history to see if you can find the Firefox Home entry.

I can tell that I will not be able to navigate back to Firefox Home Page because once I hit enter key after typing my search terms and get to the next page to see search result, the back button is still greyed out.

This is a very recent change. In fact, if I launch a clean profile, I can see that the behaviour there is as I expect. So why is it that Firefox settings get to mess up on their own and the only solution is to refresh thereby losing all the settings.

This is one thing that is very frustrating about Firefox. Settings keep changing and there's nothing to be done other than refreshing. I can definitely understand why Firefox market share is so low. Searching the web I see so many issues are resolved by refreshing Firefox yet none of the other browser have such drastic measure of correcting issues. If it wasn't the power of containers, I'd have already left Firefox. I guess we have to keep dealing with such.

I'm beyond frustrated and now I'm starting to ramble on. I'll leave it at that.

You mention containers in your above reply. If you use containers then that could be a possible cause for this permission issue.

I've got no one to blame but myself and apologies for the noise.

I recently added a very cool (IMO) plugin to Firefox - Tab Groups. In combination with Containers, the outcome is magical. What I have is being able to close multiple Firefox windows and not lose any tabs. In addition, I configured some sites (Google search results being one of them) to always open in a specific container. As such, when I open a new tab, it doesn't open in the Google search container so after typing my search terms and hitting enter, it automatically switches to the Google search container. Because this is the first page this container is seeing, it doesn't know I came from the Firefox default home page so I cannot navigate back!

That shot in the foot was painful to bear but it is definitely self inflicted. The good thing is that I do not have to refresh Firefox and lose all my settings.

Thanks @cor-el for pointing me in the right direction.