Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Disable New Tab Page in Firefox 13

Firefox 13 introduced something called "New Tab Page" which shows a history of 9 most visited pages in a tile interface, much like the way Google Chrome does. Actually it looks like the picture below:


But, there are two problems with it. First, if you don't want your browsing history to be shoulder-surfed (someone looking at your browser over your shoulder), this is not a good thing. Second, it actually makes the new tab open a slighter slower than before for which the reason must be obvious.

Anyway, since there's no point-and-click kind of configuration options anywhere in Firefox 13 to turn this feature off, we need to edit Firefox's hidden global configuration settings. This settings interface can be reached by typing "about:config" in the address bar and pressing enter. It will show you a plethora of Firefox's internal options. Most of these options are explained in "Mozilla Knowledge Base". In order to turn off the new tab page, the two relevant options are:
  1. browser.newtab.url
  2. browser.newtabpage.enabled
You can quickly locate these two by typing "newtab" in the search bar. As the name suggests, the first option is set to "about:newtab" as default which is the page that displays the 9 most visited page links in tiled interface. We can set it to "about:blank" to force disable the new tab page feature. The second option is better is setting it to "false" (by right clicking and selecting "Toggle" from the menu) will disable new tab. Next time we click the plus icon in the tab-bar or press Ctrl+T, Firefox will open new tab page without the tiled history links. Cheers!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I didnt like this new feature. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

Perfect!! Thanks for this!

Anonymous said...

exactly what I was looking for after the update

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. this new feature is not very usable! I don't like it!

Anonymous said...

That was a great find. Thanks!

Matthew said...

Alternatively don't upgrade :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for info, i don't like FF 13 newtab

Anonymous said...

This new "feature" is a real pain. Thanks for the info about how to remove it. Why must we constantly have "enhancements" that we have to download an add on to turn off.

Anonymous said...

The little grid icon in the top right of the page turns it off...

Anonymous said...

awesome thx

Anonymous said...

thanks!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tips! Unfortunately, even if you do all that, just with typing about:newtab in the address bar, the goddamned thumbnails with your recently visited pages can be seen. Damn Mozilla, there SHOULD be an option to turn it off completely, because so far every information I saw about disabling the new tab page doesn't disable it, only hides it.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much. This new feature was anything but helpful. I really appreciate your guidance in shutting this off

Anonymous said...

If I enter blank it goes to Spanish game website
I I enter false it we look for false.com
the same for any word I put in goes to any word.com

Anonymous said...

Thanks. I just hate this feature.
As most software, browsers are becoming so bloated with features more and more people don't use nor care. This one is fine for tablets, but I don't give a sh*t on my desktop PC. At least if we could turn them off easily... but NO.

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