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Prevent Firefox from recovering scroll position from previous sessions.

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I do not want Firefox to attempt to recover the scroll position from a previous session. In other words, if I load a page, scroll halfway down the page, close Firefox and open it again, I do not want Firefox to try to jump halfway down the page. What is happening is I am loading up a tab from my previous session, trying to click on something at the top of the page that interests me, and Firefox jumps somewhere else right before I can click. It is disorienting and frustrating. Plus, it does not work correctly with websites that dynamically load more content as you reach the bottom.

I do not want Firefox to attempt to recover the scroll position from a previous session. In other words, if I load a page, scroll halfway down the page, close Firefox and open it again, I do not want Firefox to try to jump halfway down the page. What is happening is I am loading up a tab from my previous session, trying to click on something at the top of the page that interests me, and Firefox jumps somewhere else right before I can click. It is disorienting and frustrating. Plus, it does not work correctly with websites that dynamically load more content as you reach the bottom.

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The scroll position is stored as part of the "state" information for a tab in the session history file. You could prevent this from being stored by disabling state information storage, but that also could stop Firefox from storing session cookies, so on sites that use such cookies to keep you logged in, you would need to log in again. So that probably is overkill for this problem. But if you want to try it:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.sessionstore.privacy_level preference to display a dialog where you can change the value from 0 to 2 and click OK

In my test, this did not take effect until after I exited Firefox (it took effect with the next session).


As you may know, the session history files are compressed. Thus, it is not easy to strip out just the scroll information between sessions, although it does seem theoretically possible for an external utility to do that.

It might be possible for an add-on to reset the scroll position of a restored tab to the top of the page after it loads, but this might still involve Firefox first scrolling down before control is turned over to the extension. ???