I recently switched to Firefox on Android from Chrome for obvious reasons. It's great! Except the new tab page is a piece of shit. I've already disabled all the sponsor rubbish and stuff*, I want to choose specific links to put there and stop it from adding links to random places I happen to visit that I can't get rid of without removing it from my history. Why this behaves like this is beyond me. I should be able to SET my shortcuts, not have to rely on Firefox to hopefully pick the right ones for me and then have to put up with every other one it decides to add or wipe them from my history.
*Why are these options so poor? I don't want recent bookmarks on this page, I want the ones I've used the most, which will have been bookmarked the longest. Recently visited? "Hey do you wanna return to that one Google search from a day ago?" Why!?
Whilst I'm here, can I change tabs to work like Chrome. I.e. currently on Firefox when I'm on the new tab page, and I click a shortcut, it then opens a tab, pressing back goes back to the new tab page but leaves the tab open in the background rather than closing it.
The new tab page should be part of the new tab, hence the name, so when I press back I should still be in that tab, but back to the new tab page, and without any tabs open in the background that I now have to go and close myself. If I don't choose them, next time I go to that site by pressing the shortcut, it'll open the already loaded tab instead, forcing me to refresh it manually and adding a superfluous step for literally no rational reason I can think of. Firefox seems to act like a tab is launched from the new tab page, rather than the new tab page is the first page you see in a new tab.
I hate these behaviours, they don't make sense, so thanks in advance for at least trying to fix them for me.
3-dots -> Customize Homepage -> remove check for "sponsored shortcuts"
"I've already disabled all the sponsor rubbish and stuff"
Did you disable "Jump back in" and "Recently visited" as well? If you did, you might need to be more specific with what you mean by "other stuff", ideally by sharing a screenshot with an arrow pointing to the things you don't want to see.
I did, only shortcuts are turned on. It's just sites that I go to, after a few times they show up on the shortcuts section until I hold on them and select delete from history. Does seem weird that it does it considering jump back in, recently visited and recent bookmarks are disabled.
I've actually removed them, I want a way to stop it happening again. I'll visit a random site a few times for a screenshot when I get chance soon. The sites I've pinned myself have a little pin icon on them whilst the other stuff that's appearing doesn't, if that helps?
As far as I know you can't stop those from showing. I just pinned enough to cover the first page of those and I never swipe to the next so I totally forgot that was a thing.
Ah damn, that's annoying. I only really use four sites on mobile these days...oh well, thanks for the help!
Ah yeah I get you. Funny, I guess that it's just rare that people want that?
And yeah, I guess you can pin a couple of other random websites (e.g.
about:blank,about:mozilla), but I get that that's not entirely satisfactory. Another option that might or might not suit your use case is to open settings, tap "Private browsing", and then "Add private browsing shortcut" - and then launch Firefox via that shortcut. I think you'll still be able to pin favourites, and other than that no history will be saved.