I have two identical Win10 laptops (Dell) with Firefox on both. A week ago (about Feb 7, 2022), Firefox on one of them began to misbehave: on launch, the initial window was blank instead of loading the initial URL; on opening a new tab with a URL, the window stayed blank and never loaded any content from the site. I tried uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling, but nothing improved. Eventually, I brought the laptop to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. They did the same things, but nothing improved for them, too. We suspected malware so they re-imaged the hard disk with a fresh Win10 OS. So far Firefox is OK. Of course, we have had to go and recreate all the old bookmarks, reinstall all the old programs, etc.
But then late last week, Firefox on the second laptop started acting the same way. I don’t really want to go through an entire re-image because this laptop has many more old bookmarks, programs, and data – so I opened Task Manager. When I launch Firefox from the Task Bar, I can see a half-dozen or dozen Firefox processes even though nothing opens for Firefox. For a few days, I could get a private window to work, but now that has stopped working, too. Interestingly, Chrome works fine (although it does not have of the functionality that Firefox had when it was working.) Although the box is Win10, I don’t have Edge on it. At this point, I do not have many options short of getting rid of Firefox altogether – which I’d really prefer to not do – but Firefox is just not working for me any more.
How do I go about finding and fixing what is wrong?