That is just a message telling you that you can restore your previous session. I would find that rather annoying myself, but I would also find it annoying to use a home page that I did not create or choose myself, and especially if that page were an interface to a search site. The builtin Search Bar is far more convenient than using a simple search web page, and up on the menu bar provides a little more space in half screen window size and a lot more when expanded. Mozilla changed the home page to one that is on your machine so it should be more efficient and come right up. The new home page is "about:home" but you can as before use any page you want and not see that message. *https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/How to set the home page You can make Google your home page *http://www.google.com/ The black bar is Google's experimentation, can read about that at *http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/evolving-google-design-and-experience.html For me a Google page with black background makes links impossible to read, even at the top. You can now go to the History menu and use "Restore Previous Session" whether you provided for the session to be saved or not. You can also restore previous windows and previous tabs. When starting a new session Previous Windows is grayed out until your restore previous session. For more detail see item #31 ... You can make Firefox 4.0.1 and '''Firefox 5.0''' look like Firefox 3.6.17, see numbered items 1-10 in the following topic *[http://dmcritchie.mvps.org/firefox/firefox-problems.htm#fx4interface Fix Firefox 4.0 toolbar user interface, problems (Make Firefox 4.0 look like 3.6)] ''Mine are also just suggestions as well, you don't have to make things look like Firefox 3.6.18, but if there are features that you prefer you have a lot of things that you can bring back, and you should also know how Firefox works in 4.0.1, and 5.0, or if you have some problems with 5.0 there may be answers to your problems there as well.''