What is the ‘Firefox was not found on this server’ error?

Q My Windows 7 has lost its home page, which is blank except for a message that reads: ‘Not Found. The requested URL /firefox was not found on this server’. In addition to this, the only visible tab is labelled as ‘404 Not Found’ and has a little dotted square.

I’m not sure why this is happening but I recently installed Uniblue’s Speed Up My PC application, which deleted a number of Registry entries, so I suspect this may be the cause.
Graham S

Read more: Firefox articles | Web browsers

A Thanks to the message, we know which browser you’re using and also the cause of the problem. In fact, this is a Firefox bug that has only recently surfaced, and it has nothing whatever to do with Speed Up My PC.

When you launch Firefox it is set to visit http://start.mozilla.org/firefox, which has been the browser’s default home page for many years. However, Mozilla (Firefox’s developer) has recently replaced this website address (or URL) with a different one: the default home page URL is now http://start.mozilla.org.

The trouble is, many browsers are still set to point at http://start.mozilla.org/firefox and, while this retired URL should redirect to the new home page address, at the time of writing it doesn’t. Similarly, a fix has yet to be issued though it has been reported. You can follow its progress at Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug-reporting page.

Fortunately, it is a very easy problem to fix yourself, by setting a new home page URL. To do this, first click the Firefox menu, choose Options and then select the General tab. In the Startup section, type the preferred URL (such as http://start.mozilla.org) into the Home Page field and make sure that ‘Show my home page’ is selected from the ‘When Firefox starts’ dropdown menu above. Click OK, restart Firefox and you’ll be back where you were.