The most obvious changes should be changes to the default home page (about:home) and new tabs (e.g., thumbnails of pages when you press Ctrl+t). If you had customized these before, either with a home page URL in options or an add-on that fills the blank tab, then you might not see any change -- I think Firefox preserves your current settings.

Firefox 13.0 Release Notes - Desktop

See also:

• http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/features.html

Changing opening a new tab from Google to *blank* (under Options) only brought up the 5 options at the bottom of the page. I do not have the the new tab thumbnail feature. The other things don't look new.to me. (I already figured out how to get the new Firefox button and to put the open bookmarks button on the navigation toolbar.)

It sounds like you might be using some sort of addon for the new tab page. Is that correct? You said you changed new to FROM google to blank. That isn't an option in a vanilla Firefox install. To get the new tab page you'll need to disable whatever addon is currently managing that. You could try it out by starting Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down shift while it is starting up.

That's actually under Option > General > Startup > Homepage, not an add-on. It's possible that the "new tab" feature just needs to populated by opening and closing tabs and restarting Firefox like normal until it has data. Something I read said that updating Firefox can cause this particular subset of history data to be wiped clean. Or are others having a different experience?

I assume that you mean the about:home page that opens on startup.

You can set the home page to about:newtab if you want to see that page instead of about:home that you get if you set the home page to an empty string.

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/How+to+set+the+home+page

No, I mean the page you see whenever you open up a new tab, i.e. the "NEW TAB" feature, that shows most visited/recently visited pages. This is not bookmarks, favorites, or recently opened.

This thread is getting a little confusing...

Home Page Setting: you deleted what you had in options before leaving the URL blank, so now you get about:home with the new buttons on the bottom.

New Tab: you are not yet getting the new tab page (about:newtab) described in this article: Customize your Firefox New Tab page.

One possible reason is add-ons that take over the "new tab content" function. Usually you can figure out which one from the content. You can uninstall or disable the suspected add-ons to see whether you get the new tab page.

You also could check here:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the filter box, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) If browser.newtab.url isn't set to about:newtab go ahead and double-click it and type that in, or right-click and choose Reset to see whether that inserts the new value.

If you press Ctrl+t to open a new tab, it should take effect immediately.

Any progress?

Do you see the about:newtab page if you open that page directly in the location bar?

You may not see items on that page if you run Firefox in Private Browsing mode or have the history disabled.

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Private+Browsing
• Firefox/Tools > Options > Privacy > Firefox will: "Use custom settings for history"

I am having same problem as Firefox13, and I tried all your suggestions, to no avail. Could it be something to do with other protection and permission settings set my by institution?

Hi jsuser, I can't think of a way your institution could change the new tab page, in a manner that's completely invisible to you, unless it's done through an add-on. Incidentally, did you previously have a blank new tab or were you using an add-on to add content to it? If you had such an add-on, try disabling it in case there is a conflict.

Edit: In case you haven't used it before, you can disable add-ons here:

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Add-ons

Check the Extensions and Plugins categories

Do you see page XML page code of the new tab page if you inspect the page source via the right-click context menu of the new tab page (the tab should be labeled as such)?

Thanks, I had already checked that I had Firefox set to "about:newtab." However, you were correct about there being add-ons that were interfering with seeing the New Tab page. A few adjustments, and voila'. I guess (it seems) everything is working now. Thank you.

jscher2000, I have been following the thread about add-on and not sure I really understand it. I don't THINK I have any add-ons, but if I do, I wouldn't know how to find out. As to whether I have a blank new tab, yes I think so. It just has a search box and a blue menu bar at the top with "Web, Images, Videos, News, Shopping". But there's also an icon for our organisation there. Is this an add-on?

Cor-el - yes I think the XML page code is right. This is what comes up. <title>New Tab</title>

Hi jsuser, by any chance, are you using the enterprise version of Firefox, with a version number similar to 10.0.5 (you can check Help > About Firefox for the version number)? In that case, I don't think the tab thumbnail feature is available for your version yet.

And just to be clear, the thumbnails should appear on the page that appears when you press Ctrl+t. If you see something that looks like a Google search page but with your company's own logo -- and you do not work for Google -- that does sound custom. You might check with your IT on whether you can change it.

Hi jscher. I have version 13.0, but it seems my organisational logo is the issue. I'll talk to my IT. Thanks