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Why does FF on Windows 10 open with all the same tabs that were open at shutdown - whatever startup options are selected?

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

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The line above says it all. But in more detail, this is what happens: since the upgrade to Windows 10 I must close all the open tabs before shutting Firefox down unless I want to re-open them when I next launch Firefox. The settings in the FF startup page have no effect on the startup state.

The line above says it all. But in more detail, this is what happens: since the upgrade to Windows 10 I must close all the open tabs before shutting Firefox down unless I want to re-open them when I next launch Firefox. The settings in the FF startup page have no effect on the startup state.

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Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.

You can check if this user.js file in the Firefox profile folder sets the browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once pref to true.

You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: "Open with"; do not double-click). 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.

You can delete the user.js file if you didn't create this file yourself.

Do not edit the browser.sessionstore.resume_session_once line and change its value to false, but either remove this line or delete the user.js file (recommended if you haven't created this file). The normal usage of this pref is to reload tabs when you have to restart Firefox (update or installing an extension).

You can use this button to go to the current Firefox profile folder:

Windows hides some file extensions by default. Among them .html and .ini and .js and .txt and you may only see a file name (User) without file extension. You can check the file extension (type) in the properties of the file in Windows Explorer via the right-click context menu.