Why does Firefox keep me logged into websites after closing and reopening the browser?
As of today, Firefox has been behaving differently. Namely, when I close Firefox and reopen, I am still logged in to email and other sites. I have all of my privacy settings checked, such as clear history, offline data, form history, etc etc so that they all will be deleted upon closing but this has no effect. Can someone provide insight as to why this is happening and how I can correct it? Before today, after closing and reopening the browser I was required to log in to any sites requiring UN and PW.
I have rechecked all history deletion options to make sure all the appropriate ones were selected. Yesterday, I noticed inbox.com and a program called 24x7 Help were installed on the computer, without my knowledge. I promptly uninstalled them,but I'm not sure if they could somehow be responsible for the odd behavior.
Modified by jsigh
All Replies (5)
Such a behavior indicates that you keep the cookie(s) that verify that you are logged on to a web server.
Are you using session restore to open those tabs automatically?
- Tools > Options > General > Startup: "When Firefox Starts": "Show my windows and tabs from last time"
You can set the browser.sessionstore.privacy_level pref to 2 (never) or 1 (non-HTTPS, default in Firefox 3 versions) on the about:config page to disable saving cookies via session restore.
You can change the browser.sessionstore.privacy_level_deferred pref that is used when you do not reopen the previous session automatically via "Show my windows and tabs from last time".
Thanks for your response. My startup is set to When Firefox Starts: go to homepage. I checked the about.config and tried adjusting the values of the attributes you mentioned, but it had no effect.
That said, your comment that it has to do with retaining cookies was spot on. The cookies are not getting deleted, as I found when I viewed all cookies after closing and reopening. Manually deleting them fixed the login issues....However, I would like Firefox to delete them automatically as it had been doing before today. This is puzzling.
Update: I looked at the task manager after closing firefox, and the in the processes tab it was still running (even though it did not show up as a running application in the application tab). I ended firefox manually, reopened it, and the cookies were deleted. So,for some reason when I close firefox, it does not really shut down...and thus the cookies are not getting deleted.
Modified by jsigh
What are the cookie settings?
Do they expire when you close Firefox?
You may need to remove existing cookies if you change the cookie setting to make Firefox store new cookies with the correct expiration time or change them to session cookies.
Yep, same here. I've been using Firefox for years, and have my settings such that every time I shut the browser off it deletes my history and erases cookies. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it started keeping me logged in to all kinds of stuff (gmail, ebay, etc.) after I shut Firefox down. I checked all settings, and they're the same as they always were...ie, don't save history, log off after shutdown, etc. I have no explanation, but it's really frustrating and doesn't seem to have a fix.
I had forgotten to update this, but your message was a good reminder. In my case, I went to the Task Manager and in the processes tab, found firefox and clicked on end process. That seemed to work and subsequently closing firefox and reopening resulted in normal behavior. Give it a try and perhaps it will work for you.