Firefox extra tab on startup

[Larry N.]

In the last few days Firefox on my W7 Pro machine, and my wife's W7 Home machine has been starting up with a tab (and it's forced active) for Mozilla's check updates page, even after I turn off "check for updates" in the Options menu. It's never done that before, and is annoying.

Does anyone have any info on what Mozilla has done (and no, we didn't update either machine to make this happen)?

 

[Ned]

What do you have set in Options, General, Startup?  What version of Firefox are you using?

 

[Larry N.]

My version is 3.6.13, my wife's is much later. Our settings haven't changed in months, but this just started a couple of days ago. I did turn off all checking for automatic updates, though on both machines, and they still do it. Startup is my home web page, which comes up in the leftmost tab, but this update page comes up in a second tab and the focus is in this tab.

Note that my Win XP machine doesn't do this. Is anyone else encountering this?

 

[Ned]

Version 3 is so old and unsupported, Mozilla is forcing the update message.  I recommend you go ahead and update to the latest released version 15 and get the benefit of all the security and feature updates.

 

[Larry N.]

If they are doing this, I may get rid of Firefox, and I can't even find anything on their web page that lets me complain -- have to update to the latest version first . Huh? . I haven't updated because of a couple of add-ons that are not updated. But the page is about plug ins, not about FF itself. Since 3.6 still works, I see no need to go get "the latest and greatest" and lose functionality.

BTW, 3.6 is not OLD, though it's now unsupported. This computer is less than 2 years old, and Firefox on here has been updated several times (until they went to a new "version" every month (or so it seems) and broke add-ons: N0HR Propfire and Live IP Address, for example.

 

[Ned]

Then get version 10, the Extended Support Release.  It gets only security updates for one year.  The next ESR release will be version 17.  The Mozilla release schedule is every 6 weeks and there have been many articles written about why they have gone to this.  I won't rehash it here but there are good reasons for it.  Addons that haven't been updated by the authors are not the fault of Mozilla.  The latest versions actually assume all addons are compatible with new releases with very few exceptions.

 

[Larry N.]

Apparently no one else sees this. Weird! They shouldn't bring up a web page at startup that I don't want, regardless of their reasons.

Thanks anyhow.

 

[Ned]

I have a copy if Firefox 3.6.26 and it doesn't show that behavior.  If you want to stay with version 3, then I suggest you at least get the latest version 3.  Yours is 13 releases out of date for version 3.  That's probably what they're trying to tell you to do.