This is a problem that I ran into, and Google didn’t offer any answers, so I’m going to add the fix for this to Google.
I’m not sure if this means anything, but I’ve got the Tab Browser Extensions installed. Last week, I went to click out of Firefox with multiple tabs open, and was presented with the “Close Multiple Tabs” dialog box.
Normally, I close the one to the left, but this time, I accidentally clicked the one in the middle. Oof! The next time I opened Firefox, my tab session was restored. I didn’t want that. So, I went into the Options dialog, and set it to open at my homepage, and it didn’t fix it.
I went back in, opened up a second tab, and closed Firefox. When the dialog came back up again, I clicked the button on the left. It still didn’t fix it. Well crap.
I then decided to check out the Tab Browser Extension box. After digging through there, nothing was fixed. Next I dropped into the nefarious about:config console.
Trying to fix the startup page, I went to browser.startup.homepage. I checked and double-checked the four settings that began with browser.startup., to no avail. I hate filing Firefox bugs, and I was hoping that I could do something to fix it without bothering the Mozilla team.
I finally decided to Google for it. I tried “fix firefox homepage”, “firefox startup problems”, “save tab session and close all tabs”, and a few other variations, and nothing came up. I did, however, come across this page when I searched for the “save tab session” query. It gave me the idea to search the about:config dialog for “tabSets”.
In the “filter” box, I typed in “tabs”. This allowed me to find the fix for the problem. I changed the following keys to the following values. Note that these keys all have browser.tabs.extensions. prepended to them.
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restore_last_visited_tabs false
restore_last_visited_tabs_ignore_OpenURL_requests false
restore_last_visited_tabs_one_time false
restore_last_visited_tabs_one_time.hide_alert false
restore_last_visited_tabs_one_time.hide_changemode_alert false
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Problem solved. Hopefully, this will help someone in the future.
