@tech

If you’re a Firefox user, you’ve no doubt noticed for some time now when you open a new tab you are greeted by a large set of 9 icons and links for some of the sites you visit most often.  You may also have noticed that they seem to change over time, but that you can ‘pin’ these icons in place, and even reorder them, so they don’t change. Many don’t like this and would prefer to get the blank tab back.  Those who do like it, me among them, might wonder where are these links stored and can I edit them?  I finally went looking and found the answer.

This requires editing the about:config file.  If you aren’t familiar with this you might want to turn back now.

To get started open a new tab and enter “about:config” (without the quotes) as the URL.  If you’ve never done this before FF gives you a warning, which you can disable for the next time you might chose to go here.  Just promise you’ll be careful and proceed.

You should have before your eyes the entire list of your FF settings.  Narrow that down by entering “newtab” (again, no quotes) in the search bar at the top.  Now you probably only see a few lines unless you have an add-on that uses this as part of it’s setting.

The most common edit here that can easily be found all over the net, is simply getting rid of the new tab page and going back to a true blank page.  To do this, find the Preference named browser.newtab.url and double click on it’s value which is currently set to about:newtab and change this setting to “about:blank” (no quotes), quit and restart FF and you’re done.

For those who appreciate the quick launch icons but would like further control, read on.

The default number of icons is 9, 3 rows with 3 columns.  Want more icons?  No problem.  Locate the Preferences named browser.newtabpage.columns and browser.newtabpage.rows and change their values from the default 3 to what ever you’d like.  I haven’t tested to find out if there’s a limit on how large these settings can be as I’ve settled on 4 columns with the default of 3 rows.

Now let’s edit those links, pinned or not.  This is a bit more tricky and I didn’t find this info anywhere online which is what inspired me to post this here.  All of the settings for the actual links reside not in a database or separate XML file as you might expect, but right here in about:config, and all in one Preference single setting: browser.newtabpage.pinned.

It’s best to perform this editing using your favorite plain text editor.  Do NOT use a word processor such as Microsoft Word because we don’t want the text formatting with fonts and attributes and such.  Although I suppose if you simply copy and paste your edited text it might be safe, however I would still recommend a plain text editor.  For the Mac I like TextWrangler.

Once your text editor is ready for work, copy the value of browser.newtabpage.pinned and paste in to your text editor.  It can be one very long and continuous line of text so you’ll be doing a lot of sideways scrolling.  Be sure during your editing not to change it from one long line of text.

So you should have something similar to this:
[{"url":"http://cyclops.creed3.com/","title":"c y c l o p s"},{"url":"http://www.google.com/","title":null},null,{"url":"https://trello.com/","title":"Trello"},{"url":"https://duckduckgo.com/","title":"Search DuckDuckGo"},{"url":"http://www.theindychannel.com/","title":"Home | RTV6 TheIndyChannel.com"}]

Let’s note some important things about this:

• The entire line is enclosed in brackets: []
• The links are separated with commas
• Links that are not pinned and can change randomly based on the sites you visit, have the value “null” (without the quotes) IF they are surrounded by pinned links (such as between google and trello.com in the example above). Non-pinned links that follow pinned links simply are omitted in this list.
• Each pinned link is enclosed by curly brackets: {}
• Each pinned link has 2 sections (the link URL and the text title of the link) that are separated with commas
• Pinned link URLs are always formatted like this (INCLUDING quotes): “url”:”http://cyclops.creed3.com/”
• Pinned link text titles are always formatted like this (INCLUDING quotes): “title”:”c y c l o p s”, unless there is no text title such as with google in the example above, which is null without the quotes like this: “title”:null

One trick I’ve discovered so far is if you really don’t want the random links coming up in the non-pinned places, instead of having no entry (at the end of the list) or a null entry, you can use this to pin an empty link and stop the random links: {“url”:null,”title”:null}

If all of this makes sense to you, all that’s left to do is to carefully edit away, following the above rules.  Make sure the final edit is all on one line, copy and paste in to the value for the Preference browser.newtabpage.pinned.  You’ll need to restart FF to see your changes.

If during editing you discover some addition rules or gotchas that come in to play, please comment here or drop me a line so I can include it here.