You can check the <b>browser.newtab.url</b> pref on the <b>about:config</b> page and set that pref to your preferred new tab page. * the default new tab page with the tiles is <b>about:newtab</b> * the default home page is <b>about:home</b> * for a blank page you can use <b>about:blank</b> The browser.newtabpage.enabled pref should be set to true to use the page set via browser.newtab.url as the new tab page. If you do not keep changes after a restart or otherwise have problems with preferences, see: *http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved ---- Do a malware check with several malware scanning programs on the Windows computer. Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. All these programs have free versions. Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan. *Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:<br>http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php *AdwCleaner:<br>http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/<br>http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Removal-Tools/AdwCleaner.shtml *SuperAntispyware:<br>http://www.superantispyware.com/ *Microsoft Safety Scanner:<br>http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx *Windows Defender:<br>http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/using-defender *Spybot Search & Destroy:<br>http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html *Kasperky Free Security Scan:<br>http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller. *Anti-rootkit utility TDSSKiller:<br>http://support.kaspersky.com/5350?el=88446 See also: *"Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked *https://support.mozilla.org/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-caused-malware

http://www.wintips.org/how-to-modify-new-tab-page-behavior-on-internet-browser/ Followed these instructions and it worked.. so far

Note that modifying the <b>browser.newtab.url</b> pref to set the new tab page is in the first part of my above reply.