How to disable new tab page in Firefox

Chris Ilias 10 Comments

Sometimes people complain about Firefox lacking a feature that is already there, but they didn’t notice. A common one is the ability to prevent Firefox from displaying thumbnails of websites you often visit when opening a new tab.

I thought most people knew how to do it, until I saw one of the Firefox developers not know about it!

Here’s how to disable it:

Just click on the tile icon in the top-right corner of the new tab page.

10 Responses

  1. Mardeg September 28, 2012 / 5:44 pm

    For those that prefer to have the old about:blank back, in about:config find

    browser.newtab.url

    and edit the value of that to about:blank

  2. Stephan Sokolow September 28, 2012 / 11:14 pm

    Generally, when I disable my new tab pages (and home page, in the days when they were the same thing), it’s about improving the responsiveness of opening a new tab, so I stick to browser.newtab.url.

  3. mu September 30, 2012 / 6:57 pm

    I agree, it seems simple, but it also took me 5+min to find. The button is non-obvious.

  4. Brett October 2, 2012 / 8:57 pm

    Especially for people who often hold online meetings, it can be a real privacy issue to have this showing by default. No doubt given Mozilla’s penchant for adapting from Google, there may already be plans to add an “Apps” section in addition to the “Most Visited” option once the Mozilla Marketplace is out of beta, but may I suggest an option to view one’s own pinned apps within this page (or maybe have an option to pin apps just to this screen rather than as mini-tabs)?

    I know it may seem redundant, but it would be very helpful to have a big reminder about these local apps and have an easy way to access them without needing to click tiny tabs (even though these tiny tabs are useful in themselves–though would be better if one could also have Group-specific pinned apps, e.g., so my Work group apps could differ from say my Firefox group apps, while being able to share across groups too).

    I think the proposed page could leverage the apps’ and to display something visibly appealing–a hopefully good impetus to allowing Scalable SVG type favicons in Firefox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon#File_format_support )

  5. Stuart Pilling October 3, 2012 / 1:04 am

    Thee is no hide the new tab page icon in the top right hand corner of my new page. Is the facility disabled , and how do I enable it.

  6. Josh McGran October 3, 2012 / 3:58 am

    What if I want to re-enable the New Tab page ? i love it cuz then i don’t need to type the web address. I had to download some software and it changed my homepage to babylon.com . I changed the homepage but everytime i opened a new tab that babylon.com would open. my friend changed it but now it shows “about:home” the Mozilla start page.

    I want that new tab page back with those thumbnails. Please help me.

    Thank you, have a good day.

  7. benoit October 3, 2012 / 6:08 pm

    cool !

  8. mp December 5, 2012 / 9:20 pm

    I cannot, for the life of me, get my settings back to what they used to be; i hate the new tab thing and cannot find the button; not sure where the ‘go back’ arrow is when I’m in a site, etc. – maybe it’s me (it must be), but I cannot figure it out and could use some solid help. A phone call would be good to walk me through it if possible….I’m going slightly insane!

  9. kmcsport January 14, 2013 / 12:22 am

    I upgraded Firefox to 18.0 and lost my new tab page along with the settings. How do I get me new tab page back so I can reset my most common websites? Why was there no warning that this option was being removed? It’s driving me insane!!! All I keep finding is how to disable it. Very Unhappy Camper!

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