Recently I encountered a weird behavior where a strange webpage showing up every time when I launched my Firefox.
The first thought came into my mind is that my homepage of Firefox had been tampered. It might be changed because some software changed my browser settings to promote something.
So the next immediate thing I went to check was to see my Firefox browser settings.
To my surprise, the homepage setting was not touched. It would still open the Momentum screen which would display some beautiful pictures of nature randomly. I tried to reset them to default but it still had the same issue.
After some play around I noticed that this strange webpage would show up only when the browser was newly launched and it would show the correct Momentum page when a new page was opened thereafter.
I went to check further on to see whether there was any setting about startup page in Firefox. In my current version, there was no such setting neither.
Out of no clue on why it would open such a strange page. I then realized whether it would be some parameter passed to the browser launch command which told it to open that page. This is just like a command line tool taking parameters when it runs. So I checked the Properties of the Firefox launch app.
In the Shortcut tab, the Target field specified the command to run when clicking on the Firefox app on desktop. It was trying to run firefox.exe. But wait, there was a parameter followed which was a URL. Yah, that's the trick, this was the page being opened when the browser was launched.
After removing this URL from Target field, I would expect that the browser would launch normally with the Momentum page. And yes it worked.
Hope this helps if you encounters similar issues. By the way, this applies to Chrome and other browsers as well.
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