See How to set the home page

Thanks, but the problem I'm trying to solve is to get my home page to open automatically when I am already in Firefox and click on the new tab "+" sign to the right of my most recent tab. I have not found a solution to this in the link "How to set the home page" nor in the various help pages on new tabs.

Why don't you simply click the Home button?

If you install the "Tab Mix Plus" add-on, you can achieve this quite easily.

Tab Mix Plus > Options > Events > New Tabs > Load on new tabs: Home Page.

Hope that helps.

Perfect; thanks.

TabMix Plus is a "ton" of an extension, when all you need is a "1 lb" fix.
New Tab Homepage extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/777

That can also be done without installing anything, just middle-click the Home button to get a new Tab with your Homepage loaded.

Very good. Thanks.

With my previous browser, when I opened a new tab, it had 6 or so links of the sites I visit most. This feature just appeared one day, no idea how/why, but I loved it. It went away with an "upgrade", now I use FF & new tabs are blank. I would really love it if I could have that feature again. It is handier than bookmarks, they're all right there on a new tab.

I am not a technical writer but here is how I do it:

When you open up your browser, add the tabs for the websites you want to see. Then go to the Firefox tab (orange tab on the upper left hand corner of your browser), click on it.Hover over the “options” option to expand the menu and click on “options”. When it opens up you should already be under the "general" tab. If not click on "general". Look for where it says "When Firefox starts . . ." It should be preselected to say "Show my homepage." If not, select "show my homepage." After selecting “Show my homepage” (which should be pre-selected) it will have a box with the urls in it. If you notice under that box there is a button that says "Use Current Pages." Click that button and when you close firefox and reopen it, it should show all of the tabs that you created.

To set new tab to open your homepage without any add ons you can alter config file by following intructions, but type about:home instead of about:blank. Refer to paragraph near bottom of the page in the link below.

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/new-tab-page-show-hide-and-customize-top-sites#w_how-do-i-turn-the-new-tab-page-off

Summary of steps shown below.

In the Location bar, type about:config and press ENTER

The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear. Click I'll be careful, I promise!, to continue to the about:config page

Type browser.newtab.url in the search box.

Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and change the url from about:newtab to about:home

Click OK and close the about:config tab.

What the heck is all this abus? People here are just wanting the tab to open normally... geez

My tabs all of the sudden started opening with a page of 9 large square preview windows of what looks like my history. Wow. trying to navigate through these large viewing squares is super inefficient and makes me look all over the screen for nothing really. I find it to be a terrible experience. Luckily I found that there is a button in the top right corner that is called "hide the new tab page" so I am not having to see that messy screen. Still there should be a check box in the options to give me my home page or a search engine when I select a new tab.