How to Disable New Tab Page (Speed Dial) in Mozilla Firefox

These days all the major web browsers seem to be at a virtual war for releasing a new version. A newer version of web browsers is released every few months if not every few weeks. The latest version of Mozilla Firefox – version 13, has been released. The most notable feature of this version of Firefox is that it opens a speed dial page when you try to open a new tab. This new tab page shows the thumbnails of your most accessed websites, so that you can easily open them after opening a new tab and clicking on a thumbnail. But, for some of us, this is a headache and a privacy concern (imagine your friends coming over and opening a new tab and noticing all the sites you browse). If you do not like this new tab page feature, then you can disable it easily. Here is how :

  1. Open your Mozilla Firefox web browser and type about:config in the address bar.
  2. Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button to continue.

    Disable Speed Dial in Mozilla Firefox

  3. You would see a big list of Firefox configuration entries. Type newtab in the Search field to narrow down the list only to newtab related configuration entries. You would be able to find an entry named browser.newtagpage.enabled

    Disable Speed Dial in Mozilla Firefox

  4. Double-click on browser.newtagpage.enabled entry to change its value to false. This would disable the new tab page (also being called the Speed Dial) feature in Mozilla Firefox. Now when you open a new tab, it would show a blank tab – like it used to show in the previous versions of Mozilla Firefox.

If at a later stage, you want to enable the new tab page (or speed dial) feature in Mozilla Firefox, then follow the same instructions – only this time switch the browser.newtagpage.enabled entry’s value to true by double-clicking on it. The changes would take effect immediately.