You can change your new tab to a blank screen, or any URL of your choice.

(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 search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and enter your preferred page:

• Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
• Blank tab => about:blank
• Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
• Any other page => full URL to the page

Press Ctrl+t to open a new tab and verify that it worked. Fixed?

Incidentally, Firefox has a lot of these "about" pages. To discover more of them, you can type or paste about:about in the address bar and press Enter. When you get to a page that doesn't have a Back button, Alt+LeftArrow will return you to the previous page.

You can create these Boolean prefs on the about:config page to prevent Firefox from generating thumbnails for the about:newtab page.

• name: browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled with value: true
• name: pageThumbs.enabled with value: false

You need to delete the thumbnails folder in the Firefox profile folder to remove already stored web page thumbnails.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/new-tab-page-show-hide-and-customize-top-sites

jscher:

Wow.

It seems to have worked like a charm, and it even makes sense, which very little in Chrome does.

This is wonderful. Thank you.