Disable “Most visited” in new tabs in Firefox 3

May 30, 2009

My standard browser is Firefox 3 because of its rendering, cross-platform availability and mostly because of its extensions. Some time ago I installed Google Toolbar to be able to see the page rank of websites I visit. Since then, every new tab I open took much longer to load than previously – I had to wait entering the URL I really wanted to visit to allow Google Toolbar to render 9 screenshots of my “most visited” sites. Well that’s nice and all Google, but I’ve got shortcuts for those sites and even if I don’t, I could possibly type their URL faster than it takes you to display this rather useless page in every new tab I open. So I went on a quest to disable this function and it’s actually not hard at all!

To disable the “most visited” pages in Firefox with Google Toolbar, simply:

  • Go to about:config
  • Confirm the security question, if asked
  • There’s a search bar at the top, enter “tab” here
  • Scroll down to google.toolbar.newTab
  • Double-click that line and notice that the right-side column has been changed to “False” and the row is now written in bold
  • Close the about:config tab
  • Guest

    great! u help me get rid of ‘most visited site’ and stay with google toolbar.

    but i got another problum…
    now newtab open as a blank white page and need to press the homepage button to view the homepage. i need to open my homepage in the new tab.. any solution for that?

    thanks again.

    • Claus

      Try this plugin:

      A very simple tabbed browsing extension that loads your homepage when you open a new tab. If you have multiple homepages, the first is chosen.

      New Tab Homepage

  • Anonymous

    great! u help me get rid of ‘most visited site’ and stay with google toolbar.

    but i got another problum…
    now newtab open as a blank white page and need to press the homepage button to view the homepage. i need to open my homepage in the new tab.. any solution for that?

    thanks again.

    • claus

      Try this plugin:

      A very simple tabbed browsing extension that loads your homepage when you open a new tab. If you have multiple homepages, the first is chosen.

      New Tab Homepage

  • greybottle

    this is good, thanks. works like a charm

  • Jonescardiff

    where the hell is about:config?

    • Claus

      It’s an address, just type it into the address bar.

  • Audista

    Thanks for this. Very Helpful!

  • GR

    thanks , very crisp and helpful

  • francob

    Thanks – at last a simple and direct fix after so much rubbish advice has been published on this.

  • Vwright777

    Help! there is no ‘google.toolbar.newTab’ listed in my about:config.. is there any other way to do this? 

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