There is a fine line between privacy and flexibility. Some users think the provided options could really affect the privacy while others may think they offer flexibility. The thumbnail shortcut icons on the browser’s home page and new tab page are one simple example for this topic. Though it helps easily accessing the previously opened pages, it is not always the case. Sometimes, you might have accessed private or confidential sites. When you open the browser in front of others, it will be annoying to see those sites with thumbnail images. More frustration comes as every new tab page will also show these thumbnails of previously opened webpages from history.
New Tab Page Thumbnails – Chrome Vs Firefox
Both Chrome and Firefox browsers show thumbnails history on a new tab page. You can check a separate article on how to remove thumbnails form Google Chrome browser. Firefox, better known for its privacy features, allow disabling the thumbnails and show blank page when you open a new tab. You can also make the blank home page and remove all distractive elements when you open Firefox.
Firefox New Tab Page
Firefox browser shows the following major items on the new tab and home pages depending on your settings.
- Search box – search box with Google search engine. Remember, Google is the default search engine in Firefox. You can change this if you prefer with Bing or Yahoo!
- Thumbnail Shortcuts – list of most accessed sites with their favicons showing as thumbnails. It also includes sponsored third-party sites outside your browsing history.
- Widgets – weather, calendar, and other widgets (earlier called snippets).
- Recent Activity – list of sites that you have visited or did some action on the page like bookmarking, downloading or saved to Pocket. It shows the featured image of the page along website’s name and page title.
- Toolbar – shown on left side with the collection of tools like AI chatbots, tabs from other devices, history, bookmarks, and passwords.
- Logo – Firefox logo image.
These are the items shown in addition to the top address bar, bookmarks bar and title tabs shown on Firefox home page, new tabs and new windows. Below is how the default Firefox browser’s home page will look like. Let us check out how to remove these items.
Remove Thumbnails from Firefox Home and New Tab Page
Open Firefox browser and click on the pencil “Customize” icon shown on bottom right corner. This will open the quick settings to customize your new tab page.
- If the browser shows a wallpaper image, simply turn off the “Wallpapers” option.
- Turn off “Shortcuts” to disable the thumbnails. If you decided to keep those shortcuts, click the row dropdown and select the number of rows you want to show them. Each row shows maximum of 8 thumbnails and you have an option to keep 1, 2, 3 or 4 rows.
- Similarly, you can disable “Widgets” to remove weather and all other widgets.
For additional customizations, click on the “Manage more settings” link on the bottom. This will take you to the Firefox settings page. You can also open the special about page URL about:preferences#home to reach Firefox’s customization page. Here, you will find lot of additional options under “Firefox Home” section:
- Search – enable or disable the search box.
- Widgets – show or hide suggested widgets from Mozilla in the middle of new tab page.
- Shortcuts – enable/disable the thumbnails and change the number of rows.
- Support Firefox – enable/disable Firefox to show sponsored shortcuts icon in-between the items from your history. If enabled, you will see links like Amazon and Expedia with the “Sponsored” tag below the site’s name.
- Recent activity – you can disable the complete section or specific items like visited pages, bookmarks, or most recent downloads. In addition, you can change the number of rows as 1, 2, 3 or 4 and each row will show 4 items.
- Choose a wallpaper – this will show the same customization screen (as shown above) to select or upload a wallpaper.
- Firefox logo – show or remove the browser’s logo image.
Remove Left Sidebar Tools
For removing the tools shown on the left sidebar, click the gear (Customize sidebar) icon on bottom left corner of the new tab page. You have options to toggle vertical tabs and move the sidebar to right side. Under “Tools” section, uncheck the following items:
- AI chatbot
- Tabs from other devices
- History
- Bookmarks
- Passwords
Though it is possible to clean up all items and keep a complete blank page, we recommend having search box on the new tab page while removing shortcut thumbnails, recent activity images and widgets.
Note: After removing all the tools, Firefox will still show an empty sidebar occupying space. To remove that, simply right-click on it and select “Hide Sidebar” option. To re-enable the sidebar, go to about:preferences#tabsBrowsing settings page and turn on “Show sidebar” option under “Browser layout” section.
Alternate Option to Show Blank Home and New Tab Page
There is also an another way to use custom new tab and home page. Go to about:preferences#home page where you can find two settings under “Homepage” section: New windows and New tabs.
If you like to show a complete blank page for home and new tabs, then choose “Blank Page” from “New windows” and “New tabs” drop-downs.
Now open a new tab (or close and relaunch the browser) and see that Firefox has no annoying thumbnails and other distractive elements. Note that the new tab page will have no gear settings icon and will be completely blank. This means, you need to go back to about:preferences#home page to restore home / new tab pages by selecting “Firefox Home (Default)” option or by clicking on “Restore Defaults” button.
Setting Custom Home Page(s) in Firefox
You may be interested in opening certain webpages whenever launching Firefox browser app. In this case, follow the below instructions to assign multiple sites as your home page.
- Open about:preferences#home page and click the dropdown against “New windows” option under “Homepage” section.
- Select “Custom URLs…” and click “Choose a specific site” option.
- Enter the website’s URL you want to set as a home page in the text box and click “Add address” button.
- You can also set the home page from bookmarks or from the currently opened pages. Note that Firefox will enable “Current opened pages” button only when you have a webpage opened in another tab. Otherwise, this button will be frozen and unavailable.
- If you want to add more than one site as your home page, simply type the URL and add one by one. Alternatively, type multiple addresses separating with | between URLs. For example, use https://www.google.com/|https://www.bing.com/ in the text box for adding Google and Bing as your home page. After adding, you can drag and rearrange the order.
- Firefox will open all entered URLs whenever you launch the app or open a new window.
Remember that you can only set custom pages for home and new windows. Firefox does not have the option to set custom pages for new tabs, you can use either default or a blank new tab page.
Delete Single Thumbnail Shortcut and Recent Activity Image
Instead of disabling shortcuts or using a blank page, you can delete thumbnail icons individually from the list. This helps to keep all other shortcuts while deleting the unwanted ones.
- Open a new tab page when shortcuts and recent activity sections are enabled.
- Hover over any individual thumbnail and click on the three dots icon.
- Select “Dismiss” to remove that item from the list.
You have additional options to pin, edit and completely delete the site from browsing history.
Change Thumbnail Image in Shortcuts and Recent Activity Sections
It is also possible to customize the thumbnails appearing under shortcuts and recent activity sections in Firefox.
- Open Firefox and hover over any thumbnail icons.
- Click the three horizontal dots icon (called Open menu) on top right corner of the item and select “Edit” from the menu.
- On the pop-up that appears, you can change the title and URL if required. Click on the “Use a custom image…” link to change the thumbnail image.
- Enter any custom URL in the text box and click “Preview” button. Firefox will show the preview image as a thumbnail icon and click on “Save” button to use that image.
There are many online websites offer royalty free stock images. You can simply copy the URL of one of those generic images and use it as your thumbnail in Firefox. In this way, you can avoid someone seeing private or explicit images appearing in shortcuts and recent activity sections while keeping the sites in the list.
