Mozilla may move Firefox New Tab Page settings to Home Preferences page

Firefox users who want to modify the look and feel of the browser's New Tab Page can do so directly on it in all recent versions of the Firefox web browser.

A click on the cogwheel icon on the New Tab Page displays options to hide any element displayed by default on the New Tab Page, and to increase the number of Top Sites rows to two (instead of just one).

Firefox users who disable all elements on the New Tab Page get a blank page. The cogwheel icon is still there, however, so that users may enable elements again if they want to do so.

Firefox Nightly users, the version of the browser is 61 at the time of writing, may have spotted a change in the most recent version of the browser.

Note: Any change in development versions of Firefox may or may not land in stable versions of the web browser.

A click on the cogwheel icon does not open the New Tab Page settings as an overlay on the New Tab Page but loads about:preferences#home instead.

Firefox loads the new preferences page in the same time if no about:preferences page is open in the browser.

The current version of the preferences page lists an option to restore the default values, and to define what is displayed when a new tab page, homepage or new window is opened.

Future versions will display the New Tab Page elements on the same page so that Firefox users may enable or disable them on the new preferences page as well.

Firefox users may set the New Tab Page to the default or a blank page, and the homepage and new windows to the default, a blank page, or a list of custom URLs.

You get a blank page if you set the New Tab Page to blank page. The cogwheel icon and other elements are not displayed anymore on the page. The only icon you get on the page is the Firefox icon which loads a "let's get started" page right now.

The moving of the New Tab Page and Homepage settings to the new Home tab in the Firefox preferences, at least in the current form, creates a usability issue on the about:preferences page.

The "when Firefox starts" setting is still listed under the general tab. It gives Firefox users options to define whether Firefox should show the homepage, a blank page, or the windows and tabs that were open the last time the browser was open.

You may set it to home page there, but you can't define the URL anymore under General. You need to switch to Home to set it up.

Mozilla may have plans to move the "When Firefox starts" section to the Home tab as well to resolve that, but it is certainly something that needs fixing before it lands on the stable channel of the browser.