Most likely you use quite a number of add-ons whose number is constantly growing. Some of very popular add-ons are speed dials, which are just your favourite tabs put together in one place so that when you click a new tab it will display them for a fast access.
I've been using some speed dial add-ons for a number of years quite successfully and was very happy with them. Yet as the competition grows add-on authors start to spice their add-ons up with more features either to satisfy users' requests or gain popularity, or both. While most of such features are customizable and easy to disable or remove some of them I find really annoying and intrusive. Now most of them will silently add themselves to your already cluttered context menu or simply known right-click menu.
This is a very clean right click context menu, and this is how I like to keep it, but many of you are familiar with a less tidier version.
Another problem is that once in a while they will update their add-on and when you start Firefox it will also automatically open add-on's update webpage, which I also find distressing.
Now Firefox has a New Tab Page where you can pin your recently or most browsed websites also known for example as Top Sites in Safari. It is Firefox's native Speed Dial function. It is neat, clean and fast. The problem is that they don't offer any customization option except for either pinning (making a permanent link) or removing it, and you can only pin those websites that you have browsed.
After browsing Firefox's configuration settings I figured out a way to customize this speed dial.
Adding a website
1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
2. Click I'll be careful, I promise button, which means you promise to be careful and if you mess your configuration settings up the author of this post will not be liable in any way.
3. In the search bar enter: browser.newtabpage.pinned
4. Right click and choose Modify.
5. Now you have to be very careful. A new website link you're about to add must be enclosed in curly brackets, website links are separated by commas and they all together sit inside square brackets. So if we want to add The Free Dictionary website it will look like this:
{"url":"http://www.thefreedictionary.com/","title":"The Free Dictionary"}
Pay attention to double quotes, commas and colons when adding. So here's an example of two websites that will show up in the New Tab Page speed dial:
[{"url":"http://www.google.com/firefox","title":"Google Search"},{"url":"http://www.thefreedictionary.com/","title":"The Free Dictionary"}]
This way you can customize website addresses and their titles.
The changes will take effect after you restart Firefox.
PS. Before you can do that you need to pin at least one page. If it's a new installation just browse some websites, close the browser, open it again and you will see some websites in the new tab page. Pin any of them. Also make sure you set remember history in privacy options.
Changing the Number of Columns and Rows
1. In the about:config search bar type: browser.newtabpage.columns
2. Right click and choose Modify or double click it and change it to a desired value.
3. Type: browser.newtabpage.rows and modify the value.
