Greetings!

Did you try to re-download and install the latest version from this link with you Linux 32 bit or 64 bit version? Please do it and see if this solves the issue. If not tell me whats the new issue or existing you are facing currently.

Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove your Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. This process does not remove your Firefox profile data (such as bookmarks and passwords), since that information is stored in a different location.

To do a clean reinstall of Firefox, please follow these steps: Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.

1. Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
2. After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu and click the close button ).
3. Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:

1. • Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
2. Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
   1. Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
   2. Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.

More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.

WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

Please report back to say if this helped you!

Regards,

Kamrul Hassan:

Thank you for your reply.

I will try a clean install if nothing more promising shows up in the relatively near future. It would take a bit of time to document the configuration changes that I have made with that browser.

But more to the point, I'm using FF 57.0 on my old (Lubuntu 64-bit) laptop to test for issues before considering the transition for FF on my primary computer -- the configuration settings of which have been extensively modified over the last few years.

Ideally, what I would like is a way to simply block / remove all querying or communication between the browser and any search engine -- except, of course, when I have navigated to a search site. Of course, completely restricting such querying to a search bar, especially if I can then hide the search bar, is nearly as good.

Again, thank you very much for the suggestion.