How to Disable Enhanced New Tab Tiles in Firefox Browser

The new version of Firefox (version 33.1.1 to be exact) brings something new – it displays enhanced tiles when you open a new tab. These new enhanced tiles are no different than the usual tiles made of thumbnails of the websites that were previously visited by you – only they may contain some of the sponsored website links from Mozilla. These sponsored links are displayed by Firefox in anticipation of generating some revenue through these subtle and indirect advertisements. But for inclusion of the sponsored links, Firefox collects some of your browsing behavior data and sends it over to the Mozilla servers.

If you do not want your data to be sent over to the Mozilla servers then you can turn off the new tab enhanced tiles and switch back to the classical tiles or just display a blank page when you open the new tab in your Firefox browser. In fact, Firefox has made it very easy to switch back and forth between these different new tab options.

Firefox has three options for the new tab page – enhanced tiles, classical tiles and blank page. The blank page option shows a blank page when you open a new tab. The classical tiles option shows you the thumbnails of most visited websites. The enhanced tiles option shows you the thumbnails of the most visited websites along with some of the sponsored links.

Firefox New Enhanched Tiles

In order to select any of these, you have to open a new tab in Firefox. You can open a new tab by clicking on the small “+” icon next to a tab or you can use the hotkey Ctrl+T to open the tab. Once the new tab is opened, you can click on the gear like icon and choose any one of the options – Enhanced, Classic and Blank.

Conclusion: Firefox’s new enhanced tiles option displays you some of the sponsored links (advertisements) when you open a new tab. But you can easily disable the enhanced tiles and switch to the classic tiles from the new tab options.