There are concerns over the Firefox New Tab Page exposing the private data, if you don’t want the browser from capturing thumbnails, you can prevent thumbnail capture of Firefox by creating and enabling a hidden preference in about:config.

Mozilla has introduced the New Tab Page feature in Firefox 13 ,which shows thumbnails of the most visited sites from user’s browser history, since this feature is not unique and offered by other browsers like Opera and Chrome, despite not getting a positive response from users, Mozilla is getting criticism to this as thumbnails on NTP exposed private data.

Mozilla seems to have fixed this in Firefox 14 by excluding capturing of thumbnails that connects to secured sites, you can disable Firefox New Tab Page by setting browser.newtab.URL preference to about:blank.

Another issue raised by users with NTP is thumbnails folder in the Firefox profile folder gets bigger and bigger by day by day, and they somehow want to stop Firefox from capturing the thumbnails? Is there a way to do this? Yes, continue to read below for more details.

How to Prevent/Stop Firefox from Capturing Thumbnails

All you need to do is visit about:config page in Firefox and create a Boolean preference browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled and set its value to true.

If you haven’t got it, let me clear this for you: right-click anywhere on about:config page browse for New >Boolean and enter above preference and click ‘OK’, then set its value to True.

Combine Firefox Home Page and New Tab Page into a Single Page

From now onwards, no new thumbnails will be created, and remember, you still need to remove the old thumbnails by clearing the browser history.

P.S. In fact, we’ve not seen thumbnails folder in the Firefox profile folder either.