Reply #33: One of those things ...

[RoyGBiv]

... that is driving me up the damn wall.

Been out of sorts the last couple days, so I haven't mentioned all I discovered with this.

I hadn't noticed this since I don't generally save my tabs when I exit FF at home. I've got it set to open several different pages in separate tabs, and session restore makes that obnoxious. So, I checked my Linux box, and sure enough there was no option to "save and quit."

Well, that just made me mad.

I'm running the same version of FF at work as I am at home. Yes, Options is Preferences and is under a different menu item, but that's the only real difference, or should be. So I'm thinking about this fact that between us we've got essentially three different "versions" of FF 3.5, yours, the portable one I use at work, and my Linux one. Both the Linux one and yours give no "save and quit" option, but the portable one does. So, that got me to thinking ... and I won't bore you with that process. Madness inhabits that cave.

I fixed it, but I'm not entirely sure how I fixed it. I thought I'd figured it out, changed *one* thing like you're supposed to do when troubleshooting software, but it didn't work. Then I just got frustrated and changed ten billion things all at once and, voila, the "save and quit" option was back.

I tried my best to backtrack, and as near as I can figure, this is what did it:

Under the Main section of Preferences/Options the setting "Firefox will ..." is set to "Show my homepage" by default. All the troubleshooting attempts say this is what it should be for the "save and quit" option to show, so I hadn't messed with it. Well, I did mess with it to make sure the session restore feature actually worked. That is, I changed this setting to "Firefox will show my windows and tabs from last time." That worked the way it is supposed to by automatically saving your tabs then opening them when you restart. But, that's not quite what we want. The solution I *thought* had was another about:config setting, but it wasn't.

During my period of frustration immediately following, I changed the "Firefox will ..." back to "Show my homepage." With all the other settings the way they should be (Warn when closing multiple is clicked, browser history is remembered, i.e. not in a private session) this worked.

HOWEVER, without changing anything (that I remember) after testing it several times, it suddenly stopped working. I toggled back and forth between "show homepage" and "show last time" and it started working again.

There's a bug here of some sort that I believe is caused by functions interfering with each other. What they are, I'm not sure, but there are a lot of people with this problem and no single solution, which suggests again that it's some hidden setting that gets toggled the right way in certain configurations and the wrong way in others.