That's...not the case (and never has been) for me. You only restart it when you get an update (in which case that wouldn't be very often)? Or you did something whacky in about:config? Or maybe a bad extension. Dunno, not normal

I don't often relaunch my apps but I relaunched firefox just now to see what would happen to test this.

Here's what I was greeted with - an ad for pocket: https://i.imgur.com/hYYZYE3.png

Huh that's fun...I've had pocket disabled for so long that I forgot it was a thing. I've always been pretty vigilant about turning off nonsense like pocket, so I suppose I'm not as typical of a ff user as I thought...but still think what the parent comment described sounds abnormal.

I only start FF when I get a customer report about an issue on FF. I guess I start it seldom enough to always trigger some sort of watchdog?

Anyway, here's my 2 cents. I only open FireFox when a customer reports an issue, and I'm always barraged by a deluge of unwanted info, which doesn't encourage me to open FF more often.

If you're on the stable channel you'll see a single tab of "unwanted info" once every six weeks. Half the time it's just a generic "Firefox updated!" page.

May be OS-specific, or it may not happen when you've set Firefox to restore previous tabs when restarting, or there may be a way to turn it off.

I don't remember seeing many of these on my actual machine (I did get the color scheme nonsense if I remember correctly), but I'm constantly seeing these in dev/testing VMs where I just installed it for testing and occasionally keep it updated.

Maybe you have an old profile. I often see this kind of messaging when starting up Firefox on a freshly installed OS.

Updates are probably more frequent on the Beta/Aurora/Whatever channel?

  about:config

Search for mstone (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone) and set it to "ignore" (without the quotes) am not sure why this has to be done this way and I don't have it disabled since I want to know what's new, but hope it helps.

Oh and browser.disableResetPrompt and set it to true. Create it if it doesn't exist

Honestly, I gave-up on editing about:config.

As soon as I do it, the non-dismissable "let's reset your profile" message pops up again. There's no point.

The second setting disables this message....

But it seems like you have already given up.

Yep, I gave up way too early. Thanks.

I get none of that - you musty have some odd config.

He's exaggerating a bit bit his point still stands. After an update there's at least one extra tab about the update, and sometimes more like the recent-ish stupid color scheme feature.

Exaggerating isn't particularly helpful, makes me thing the problems the OP has with the browser are more based on perception of "culture" or something rather than the actual product

It's not about perception. The browser's job is to display webpages and otherwise get out of the user's way - Firefox constantly fails at that, much more than a lot of paid, proprietary software even.

Really? I've never had that happen and I've been using Firefox for 2 decades. Occasionally I've had a grumble about it not being the latest version, but that didn't stop me.

Short of the removal of flash I can't think of anything you could be referring to, so perhaps rather than exaggerating some actual concrete examples would be good.

Also been using FF for 2 decades, but can corroborate the experience you cannot.

I have seen all those things he complained about. Diversity initiatives, new features, etc. For me it appears as a new tab on restart that I have to close, and it does feel like it's every single time I update, and sometimes between updates.

It is especially annoying on a seldom-used machine where the browser will typically be outdated every single time you start it up. To make things worse, the machine is rarely used and only gets powered on when you actually need to do a task right away, so the bullshit update notifications are infuriating. I can put up with the updates themselves for security reasons, but intentionally getting in my way for no functional reason is too much.

Perceptions are pretty much 100% of the reason people pick a browser.

I have a pretty standard config and I got that the other day: https://twitter.com/tehwey/status/1483531515631919106

I get the same thing and I reset my config to defaults.

Same here. I just started Firefox now, UAC prompt came again. Restarted, pocket started showing me random stuff, tabs open.

I do not want any of this.

I believe the reset thing is due to it being a good way to solve user problems that have accumulated over time.

It seemed a bigger thing a few years ago, but if you keep seeing it, then they've probably identified you as someone likely to benfit from it. I don't think I've seen it for years.

This is just speculation though.

I just get an update "what's new" tab after every update, which seems reasonable if you are adding or removing things.

What? I've been using firefox for years and I never see any of this, you may want to run some virus scans.