Firefox is an excellent web browser, and it’s our pick as the suitable browser for most users. It’s fast, privacy-friendly by default, and stays out of your way. That being said, Firefox sprinkles its interface with many “recommendations” which may not be to everyone’s liking. We will see how to disable all of them in this post.
Disable Pocket icon and Pocket recommendations
Pocket is a read-it-later service baked into Firefox. If you don’t plan on using it anytime soon, it’s easy to disable – check out our post that covers the steps.
Remove sponsored shortcuts
The start page in Firefox contains shortcuts to frequently visited and pinned sites. It may also contain a sponsored shortcut or two, clicking which will generate some revenue for Firefox’s parent company Mozilla. You can dismiss a sponsored shortcut just like other shortcuts from the overflow menu (3 dots).
It’s also easy to permanently disable sponsored shortcuts. Go to Tools (≡) > Settings > Home > Firefox Home Content, and uncheck the box before Sponsored shortcuts.
Stop Firefox from recommending features and extensions
Firefox may recommend you a feature or an extension that it feels will be useful as you keep using the browser. For example, it may recommend you to install the Facebook Container extension when you open facebook.com, so that Facebook is unable to track your activity on other websites.
To turn these off, head over Tools (≡) > Settings > Home > General > Browsing, and uncheck the boxes before “Recommend extensions as you browse” and “Recommend features as you browse”.
You can go a step further and disable extension recommendations in the extensions page itself. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit Enter, confirm by clicking the button to “Accept the Risk and Continue”, search for “htmlaboutaddons” and double click the entry extensions.htmlaboutaddons.extensions.enabled to set it to false.
These steps should remove all user facing recommendations in Firefox. What are your favorite tips regarding the popular open source browser? Let us know in the comments below.
