How To Change The New Tab Behavior In Firefox 13

I reviewed the major changes in Firefox 13 earlier today.

Firefox 13 introduces a new ‘New Tab’ page – when you open a new tab it displays up to 9 thumbnail pictures of your most frequently visited web pages – you just click a thumbnail to visit that site.

Some people will find it helpful – Chrome and Opera already offer a similar feature.

However, others may have one of the following issues:

Invasion of privacy – you may not want your most frequently visited pages displayed whenever you open a new tab, especially if you share a computer.Speed of page display – you may be concerned that displaying up to 9 thumbnails might slow down the New Tab page load speed (to be fair I don’t think that it does to any appreciable extent).Choice – you may prefer a New Tab to open a different page e.g. a blank page or a specific website like Google.

An example of the new Firefox 13 New Tab page is shown below:

Firefox 13 New Tab page

If you would like to change this default New Tab behavior in Firefox 13, here are 3 possible alternatives to choose from.

How To Change The New Tab Behavior In Firefox 13

1.  Hide the thumbnails

Click on the square icon (consisting of 9 little grey squares) at the top right of the New Tab page – this hides the thumbnail pictures and your choice is remembered even after you restart Firefox.Note that the square icon remains displayed – if you click it again the thumbnail pictures will reappear on this (and all subsequent) New Tab pages.

[Geek's corner - clicking the icon changes the 'browser.newtabpage.enabled' preference in about:config to True (default) or False]

2.  Hide the thumbnails and the square icon = Blank Page

You can do this by setting the New Tab page to just open a blank page instead:

Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.Click the “I’ll be careful I Promise” warning button (if it appears) – a long list of preferences used in Firefox is displayed.

Tip: You can scroll down the list of preferences but the quickest way to find the right one is to type part of the preference name into the Filter bar at the top of the config page e.g. type newtab to narrow down the list to only display preferences containing that text.

Double click the browser.newtab.url entry and change the String Value text to about:blank (default is about:newtab).Close Firefox and reopen it – now, whenever you open a new tab it should just display a blank page.

3.  Change New Tab to open at a website of your choice

If you want a New Tab to always open a specific website e.g. Google:

Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.Click the “I’ll be careful I Promise” warning button (if it appears) – a long list of preferences used in Firefox is displayed.

Tip: You can scroll down the list of preferences but the quickest way to find the right one is to type part of the preference name into the Filter bar at the top of the config page e.g. type newtab to narrow down the list to only display preferences containing that text.

Double click the browser.newtab.url entry and change the String Value text to your chosen website address (URL) e.g. www.google.com (default is about:newtab).Close Firefox and reopen it – now, whenever you open a New Tab it should display your chosen website.

Privacy Warning

The three methods above change the default behavior of the New Tab page which appears when you click on the ‘Open a New Tab’ + icon.

However, they do not delete the thumbnails from the actual New Tab page itself – so anyone browsing directly to about:newtab will still see the thumbnails displayed (or be able to display them by clicking the square icon).

To delete the thumbnails completely you must clear your browsing history – this also clears the list of your most frequently visited sites (and therefore the thumbnails too):

1.  Manually – via Firefox Menu \ History \ Clear Recent History. Note that the thumbnails will start rebuilding again as you visit more sites.2.  Automatically – via Firefox Menu \ Options \ Privacy \ Clear history when Firefox closes (in the History section). This will erase the existing thumbnails whenever you close Firefox

Ccleaner (and similar) tools can also be used to clear the Firefox History.

Related posts:

Get The Firefox 13 New Tab Speed Dial Feature In Firefox 12How To Change The Layout Of Firefox 4Manage Or Change Default Search Engine In FirefoxHow To Get A Blank New Tab In Google ChromeChange Download Location In IE9, IE8, Firefox and Chrome

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Posted in: Behavior,Change,Firefox