How to Remove What's New Gift Box Icon From Firefox Toolbar and Menu
Starting in Firefox 70, the browser shows a new icon in the toolbar and in the main menu. Named simply 'What's new', it has a gift box icon and opens a pane that contains a brief overview of the key changes included to the current release of the browser. If you are not happy to see it, it can be quickly disabled. Also, see updates for Firefox 72 in this post below.
Firefox 70 is yet another release of the Quantum engine-powered browser. Since 2017, Firefox has the Quantum engine which comes with a refined user interface, codenamed "Photon". The browser doesn't include support for XUL-based add-ons any more, so all of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible. See
Must have add-ons for Firefox Quantum
Thanks to the changes made to the engine and the UI, the browser is amazingly fast. The user interface of Firefox became more responsive and it also starts up noticeably faster. The engine renders web pages much faster than it ever did in the Gecko era.
What's New Gift Box Icon
The main menu of Firefox 70+ includes a What's new item that unveils the key changes in the release. It has a gift box icon, which also appears in the address bar. Once you click it, it opens a welcome page with the release details.
Update: Since version Firefox 72, the method has changed. Here's what you have to do in Firefox 72. The legacy method is below
To Remove What's New Gift Box Icon From Firefox Toolbar and Menu,
- Open Firefox.
- In a new tab, type
about:configin the address bar. - Click I accept the risk.
- In the search box, type or copy-paste the line
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.providers.whats-new-panel.
- Click on the pencil icon next to the
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.providers.whats-new-panelline you found to edit it.
- Change the portion
{"id":"whats-new-panel","enabled":trueto{"id":"whats-new-panel","enabled":false.
- Click on the check mark button to apply the change.
- Restart Firefox.
The gift icon and that what's new menu will disappear from Firefox 72+. Thanks to our reader Phil for sharing this tip.
The legacy method for Firefox older than version 72
- Open Firefox.
- In a new tab, type
about:configin the address bar. - Click I accept the risk.
- In the search box, type
browser.messaging-system.whatsNewPanel.enabled. - Switch the parameter
browser.messaging-system.whatsNewPanel.enabledto False by double-clicking on it.
You are done!
The gift box icon will disappear from both the main menu and the toolbar of the Mozilla Firefox browser.
You can undo the change at any moment of time by opening the about:config page, and setting the browser.messaging-system.whatsNewPanel.enabled value back to true.
You might be interested in learning that version 70 of Mozilla Firefox comes with a new icon, new privacy and safety features, adds better system dark theme support, and more.
See the key changes in Firefox 70.
Also, you can re-enable the green HTTPS icon (pad lock) which is disable by default starting in Firefox 70.
That's it.
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Doesn’t work. Icon shows up after updates anyway.
It was working like a charm at the moment of the writing.
This works for a very short while. After some minutes the bloody icon appears again. How to kill it?
Same here: the icon disappears, but will pop up again for the next news regardless (or should I say “disregardless”?) of the flag being set to false. If you then go back to about:config, switch the flag to true and false again, it will be gone again… until next time.
I’ve set the 2 “devtools.whatsnew” to false as well, but that doesn’t help either.
Of course, if that was Microsoft or Apple, everyone would be quick to say that’s it’s a blatant purposeful move to ignore users wishes to not get crap shoved in their faces. But at least, disabling “pocket” does seem to work.