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When Firefox starts (Linux, FF 50.1.0), the window opens up in a default location, then a second later it jumps to the location it was before the application closed.

Is there a way to prevent the window from moving to its previous location when Firefox starts up?

I remember it was possible to do this in about:config, but I forgotten the exact key name that I had to change.

dgo.a
  • 891

1 Answers1

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Multiple sources online will tell you to set privacy.resistFingerprinting to true, but that didn't work for me.

The issue is actually more deep-seated than you might think: With many thanks to this reddit post, I will restate the core takeaways from it here:

  • Firefox possibly stores the last window position in xulstore.json in the profile directory, but deleting that doesn't help (which I can personally confirm as well).
  • Additionally, firefox also stores the last window position in sessionstore.jsonlz4, which is harder to edit due to being compressed in a non-standard format.

Now for the actual solution that has worked for me so far (I've been repeatedly testing it for a few minutes). Use the following script to start firefox:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

config_dir="$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" # <-- set this to where your firefox config directory is (it's probably already correct)
profile_name="main" # <-- set this to your profile folder name, which you can find out by going to about:profiles


cd "$config_dir/$profile_name"


for good measure (there shouldn't be anything meaningful in there anyway)


rm xulstore.json


[ -e sessionstore.jsonlz4 ] && {
    t=mktemp 

    && cat sessionstore.jsonlz4 | jsonlz4tool d | jq 'del(.windows.[].screenX) | del(.windows.[].screenY)' | jsonlz4tool c >"$t" 

    && cp "$t" sessionstore.jsonlz4
}


firefox "$@"

You will need to have jq and jsonlz4tool installed. The latter is a tool I wrote myself that can compress and decompress .jsonlz4 files (see this answer for more details). You can probably also make it work with dejsonlz4, but I haven't tried it.

T0mstone
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