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Comment by vasvae3 | Hacker News Reader

You are annoyed with chrome's distracting home screen that shows your most visited sites but you are not annoyed with firefox's distracting home screen that shows your most visited sites plus some ads?

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Weird, I don't see adds on my Firefox new tab screen. Maybe you accidentally checked ``Sponsored shortcuts" ? :-)

I believe it also depends on your location. I only see sponsored tiles when traveling in some countries.

"Sponsored shortcuts" comes enabled by default, at least on Windows builds made by Mozilla. If you are using Linux I suppose your distro turns it off by default?

btw in my case it adds two ads: Nike and Amazon. They come with tracking parameters that are unique to me (if I create a new browser profile, they change)

Disabling them is one click away, however.

I'm going to be pedantic and point out that it's two clicks if we count the one to pull up the settings pane in the first place

It continues to surprise me that people use the home screen, regardless of it being Firefox or Chrome. New window, new tab, I always set that to a blank page, in my mind that should be the default.

It surprises me that you'd be surprised. It's convenient to have your most used sites a single click away on the new tab screen, and it still opens instantaneously, so I don't see any disadvantage. If there's something there you find distracting, you can remove it.

> If there's something there you find distracting, you can remove it.

Now you'll have me manage yet another thing, I just want stuff to require no management.

On being surprised, I suppose you're right, there are about as many ways of using a computer as there are users. It's easy to get lured into the feeling that anything you don't utilize yourself is weird and pointless. I never use the "home screen", nor do I really use bookmarks all that much. For bookmarks I get why they are there, I have maybe a hand full myself, but it's not something that I use enough to pay for, or even require, a bookmarking service. So seeing someone actively use one or even depend on it because a curiosity.

I wish "new tab" could show me all my bookmarks instead because I have already plenty interesting pages bookmarked to read, but I never use them.

It continues to surprise me that people don't make their "new tab page" useful, it's probably the page you see the most everyday. Make it your own, put your bookmarks in there or whatever is useful (I use https://start.me/)

For me, a new window or new tab is something that's only active for time it takes me to type in the URL of the site I'm going to. At least earlier having content on that page slowed down Firefox, which is annoying if you just want to go straight to entering a new URL. So setting it to about:blank was a major workflow improvement.

There's no point to the "new tab page", it would be better to have a popup to type the URL into and then hit "Go" and have that open a new tab. For me it's really just a distraction. Why would I open a new window/tab if I didn't know where I'm going?

Firefox has made it unnecessarily difficult to customize the new tab.

You can have it blank or you can have Firefox recommendations. Those are your options.

https://i.imgur.com/U13r7pG.png

This resembles a dark pattern to push users toward Firefox recommendations, a moneymaker.

That explains the ton of extensions to manage that page. That does seem like a pretty dark pattern move, I recall it having three options, the last being a custom URL.

You're ignoring the fact that "Firefox Home" itself allows you to customize what it contains. You can remove the recommendations, shortcuts, recent pages, recent bookmarks etc. individually (or strip it all the way down to a search bar).

> You're ignoring the fact that "Firefox Home" itself allows you to customize what it contains.

Correct. I am ignoring that fact because I don't want new tabs to display "Firefox Home" and I am not interested in customizing what it contains.

I want new tabs to display an HTML file that I made myself. Firefox previously allowed doing so.

The replies that suggest using extensions to re-enable the disabled functionality probably have not actually tried doing so. What those extensions do is load the "Firefox Home" content, then (as if on page load) redirect to whatever you set as your custom new tab. Which is just wretched. I could have typed the URL faster than that.

And on the subject of pushing core browser functionality into extensions: Why are things like Pocket, Firefox Sync, Hello, and the like integrated / bundled with Firefox but the ability to set a custom URL for new tabs requires users to install / trust a third party extension?

See also: The deplorable state of "Classic Theme Restorer", another case of "Users who miss the disabled functionality can just install an extension."

There’s extensions to change the new tab page

It's absurd that it needs an extension. Another example of how Firefox no longer acts as a user agent.

I have the Bookmarks toolbar set to "Only show on New Tab," I don't want anything more than that from a new tab screen.

Long time Firefox user here, I’ve never seen ads in the browser.

I am on Mac, however. It looks like from the other comments, windows builds somehow have ads.

I think it's about the sponsored shortcuts in the default home screen.

I've had them as well (3 or 4, can't remember which ones. Amazon's search engine might have been one of them), removed them, done and done.

It's not a big deal, but it's still something.

You turned them off at some point. To turn them back on: On a new tab, click the cog in the top right. Tick "Sponsored shortcuts".

Compared to the Google panopticon... I can live with it.

If you have your new tab set to being blank it might never have shown sponsored shortcuts.

My new tab has been blank for probably over a decade now

Also annoyed when someone I know cant be bothered to open the settings and customize. It's crazy how basic stuff goes over heads.

It's annoying that defaults everywhere are to be visually noisy and distracting. I guess it works for some kinds of people. Let's say MS Edge used to show news and other stuff on the new tab page, or in the start menu or wherever.

Yes, good users customize this but the default means it's pervasive in people's average experience.

My new tab screen in firefox is a blank white screen

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