As you may know, starting in version 57, Firefox comes with a new user interface, known as "Photon". It is intended to provide a more modern, sleek feel that’s consistent across multiple platforms. The new tab page now comes with a search bar, top sites, highlights and other elements. Today, we will see how to add more sites to the "Top Sites" section on the New Tab page of the Firefox browser.
Modern versons of the Firefox browser come with a new user interface, codenamed "Photon", and features a new engine "Quantum". It was a difficult move for developers, because the browser drops support for XUL-based add-ons completely. All of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible, and only a few have moved to the new WebExtensions API. Some of the legacy add-ons have modern replacements or alternatives. Unfortunately, there are plenty of useful add-ons which have no modern analogs.
The Quantum engine is all about parallel page rendering and processing. It is built with a multi-process architecture for both CSS and HTML processing, which makes it more reliable and faster.
Here is how the new tab looks out of the box:
It includes a number of web site tiles below the search box which represents the sites you visit frequently. Unfortunately, the area is very small, so many users want to increase it. Here is how it can be done.
To add more top sites to the New Tab page in Firefox, do the following.
- Open a new tab.
- Click on the small gear icon in the top right corner of the page.
- In the settings flyout, turn on the option Show two rows. See the screenshot.
- This will ad an extra row to the Top Sites section.
Tip: If you are not happy to see the Highlights section below Top Sites, you can disable it. Refer to the article Disable Highlights on New Tab Page in Firefox. Alternatively, you can restore the classic New Tab Page in Firefox and disable the Activity Stream feature.
If you need more rows, there is a special about:config flag in Firefox which allows increasing the size of the Top Sites section.
Add more rows to Top Sites in Firefox
- Open a new tab and enter the following text in the address bar:
about:config
Confirm that you will be careful if a warning message appears for you.
- Enter the following text in the search box: browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.topSitesRows.
- Set this value to the desired number of row. I will set it to 3.
- The result will be as follows.
That's it.
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“Tip: If you are not happy to see the Highlights section below Top Sites, you can disable it. Refer to the article Disable Highlights on New Tab Page in Firefox. Alternatively, you can restore the classic New Tab Page in Firefox and disable the Activity Stream feature.”
I don’t believe the activity stream can be disabled entirely, in the current version of Firefox. The settings I had before, which allowed me to do so, don’t work anymore.
I heart you.