Load The Homepage When Firefox Opens A New Tab

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 22, 2012
Updated • Jan 22, 2012
Firefox, Firefox add-ons
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When you open a new tab in the Firefox browser you'll notice that it always opens up blank. Mozilla announced plans to redesign the new tab page in an upcoming version of the browser, but for now blank is all you get. While tabs open fast because of this, it is for some users not the optimal solution, especially if they have one page that they open very often in new tabs.

Lets say you open Google or Bing search, Reddit or Hacker News more than 50% of the time when you open a new tab in Firefox. Instead of having to load the search engine manually you could simply use the My Homepage extension for Firefox to have the browser load the page automatically for you.

The add-on works automatically after installation and restart of the browser. Whatever you have set your homepage to will be loaded when you open a new tab in the browser. Keep in mind that this can also be quite irritating if you have it set to open a page that you have open all the time in the browser.

This works best for pages that either provide a functionality that you use often, or pages that are updated regularly.

Please note that this will only load the first homepage configured in the Firefox options. The extension ignores the | separator to load multiple homepages in the browser.

You sometimes may not want to open the homepage in the new tab. The developer has enabled the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-M for this. When you use the shortcut to open a new tab in Firefox, a blank page will be opened.

Firefox users can download My Homepage from the Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

If you are looking for something bigger, you may want to look at the New Tab King extension for Firefox which displays the most visited websites, recently closed tabs and other information when a new tab is opened in Firefox.

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Comments

  1. ReX said on January 22, 2012 at 10:11 pm
    Reply

    Tab Mix Plus, something I can’t possibly use Firefox without, can do that too (and more).

    Tab Mix Plus Options -> Events -> New Tab -> set “Load on new tabs” to “Home Page”.

    1. brian woods said on June 11, 2015 at 6:34 am
      Reply

      I SAW IN SOURCE IT IS A XUL java file, the file exists within a script file. no doubt a browser fault, and if you edit out the new tab, firefox wont start.
      How i got around it, is in your chosen homepage section just place a dot there only so it will only open the annoying new tab though blank. for at least when you close each window those many new windows no longer appear in your face….
      Its maybe the easier solution until they rectify it in the next version hopefully…
      It is so frustrating that had this dot not worked, I would have stopped using firefox….

      The source code of the new offending blank page gives its location details and construction type, it is a file within a file javascript theme.

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