I’m using the latest Mozilla Firefox on Windows XP Home Edition.
Continually, although not always, the following link appears out of nowhere in
the tab section when I open the browser (he gives me the URL). I went to this
site once and never opened it again. I don’t need this site, but it’s there as a
tab. It has something to do with University of Massachusetts.
In this excerpt from
“Answercast #14, I look at several reasons why a second tab may be popping
up in your browser window and how to get rid of it.
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Browser tab appearing
There are two possible things that come to mind on this particular instance.
I believe it’s possible that you have more than one page set as your
homepage.
Most people don’t realize this, but most of the tabbed browsers these days
actually allow you to specify multiple pages, separated by semi-colons, as the
homepage. Those are the pages that come up automatically when you open your
browser or possibly when you click on the Home button.
Set your browser’s homepage
The thing to do is go into your browser’s options and verify that the
homepage or start page is set to the URL that you expect.
I actually have an article on the site about making sure you’re
setting the homepage to the page you want it to be. So I would direct you
there.
Website pop-ups
The other thing that comes to mind is: if this is happening when you visit
some other site (this second tab appears), the other site you are
visiting may have some kind of advertising network that’s throwing a pop-up
into a tab.
I’ve seen this on some sites that I visit regularly. They throw an
advertisement into a pop-up window that Firefox’s (and a couple of other
browser’s) pop-up blockers can’t actually block.
- Sometimes, it will show up as an additional window
- Sometimes, it will show up as an additional tab.
So I would pay attention to exactly when this page is showing up. If it’s
showing immediately on opening your browser, I would make sure that the homepage
setting you have configured is what you think it is.
You probably already know this, but Firefox has an option to save all of your tabs when you exit. Instead of giving you a current page, it will take you to the same page(s) you were at when you exited.
Mutiple homepages separated by semi-colons? I just tried that and it doesn’t work. I believe they should be separated by the “|” (shift-backslash). I think it’s called a pipe.
05-May-2012