This is interesting and I have not experienced it before. However another work around I can offer is by right clicking the back arrow to go back to the first page.

Thanks for the suggestion, guigs, but that doesn't work either. If the back Arrow is greyed out, even right clicking it does not show an option back to the very first (home) page I opened.

The interesting thing I am noticing is that this is an intermittent problem - with some links, I do get access to a back arrow (i.e it is black), but on others, I do not (i.e. the back arrow is just greyed out). As the home page changes regualrly (it is a Newspage after all), it is impossible to be specific as to which links work and which don't.

I am wondering if the fault therefore lies on the webpage, not with Firefox?

This is possibly the way that pages like about:home and about:newtab work, even if you replace these pages with internet alternatives. These page are meant to open links and you can't return to such a page for security reasons (a website can access the Tab history).

Sites can use the script method location.replace() instead of normal links when they want to prevent you from going back to a page. location.replace() substitutes the new address for the original one in history.

However, I don't think it's very common for news sites to do that, since normally they have no reason to block you from going back to their previous page. It would be more common on transactional sites where going back could cause problems with the flow of a process like checking out.

Does the Back button work if you open the page in a new tab with the about:blank page (use a bookmark or type the URL)?

Sorry, but not being very technical means I haven't really got a clue as to what either cor-el (in his first post) or jscher2000 are saying. In response to the question in cor-el's second post, No, that doesn't make any difference. Typing in the web address into a new tab and then clciking on some of the links from the page does not give an active Back Arrow option. And sometimes when there is a back arrow option (after clciking on 2 or 3 more links), there is still no history on this of the main Home page that was opened first - only the other pages linked to the Home Page - so I still couldn't go 'Back' to the Home Page without using the Home icon on the browser Toolbar. Why would a site like the BBC, or CNN, want to prevent a user from going back to their Home page? That makes no sense to me at all.

Still having this really annoying intermittent problem, and no-one has yet been able to solve it for me. It went away for a few days, now has just come back again. Does this mean I just 'have to live with it'?

How can I get this reported to Mozilla for their investigation?

Hi Bolehill, if you go to http://www.cnn.com/ are there particular links that open without a back button? Stories on the site seem to work normally for me in a brief test.

Thanks again jscher2000. All the half dozen or so links on the CNN site that I tried worked OK and gave me a back arrow.

But the BBC page still does not work properly for me (which is my homepage). Could you try some of the links at your end (especially Sport links) on the BBC Home Page, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and let me know whether you have any problems?

I clicked around in Sport to see a few stories and nothing strange happened for me. Opened in the same tab with the back button enabled.

I tested this just using the link in your post, not changing my home page, in case that is the difference.