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How To Fix Broken about:home Search In Firefox

Not that I recommend it, well actually I have, and do for “advanced” users (I will update that at some point), but occasionally cleaning out your Firefox profile can be a good thing. Every so often I clean the cruft out of mine. Here’s a little quirk however. The new-ish browser start page won’t perform a search when localStorage is cleaned out. It will manifest by simply doing nothing when you try to search. The form goes nowhere. If you look for errors in the console you’ll see:

"gSearchEngine is null"

The best solution I’ve found to fixing this is to go into about:config and reset (right click -> reset) these properties and restart:

browser.startup.homepage_override.buildID
browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone

I suspect it’s just buildID, however neither should be harmful. Restart and they will be recreated.

3 replies on “How To Fix Broken about:home Search In Firefox”

didn’t work for me..however i did reset the browser.newtab.preload and browser.newtab.url and its working now. thanks for taking me there

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