The easiest way to get around that is to just set your own homepage. See - How to set the home page

Many of us have disabled the changes to the top part [brandLogo portion] of the Firefox Start Page, so that we don't see that "stuff".

If you feel venturesome, here's how to "fix it". Type about:config in the Location Bar and hit Enter. Accept the "dragons" message to see the advanced prefs screen. Use the Search field at the top to enter the pref mentioned below.

You can set the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref to an empty string to stop your Firefox from retrieving "snippets" and brandLogo changes. Right-click that pref and select Modify then clear the Value for that pref in the box that appears, then click OK. That will also disable the "snippets" that appear below the Search container on the default homepage.

Then you need to open your Profile folder, via Help > Troubeshooting Information > Profile folder >> Show Folder button. Then close Firefox. With your Profile folder open and Firefox closed ("3-bar" Firefox menu button > Exit/Quit), wait minute or so, then delete the storage\moz-safe-about+home folder in the Firefox profile folder to remove the brandLogo and snippets stored in IndexedDB to make Firefox use the default brandLogo and a default snippet set.

If you should later change your mind about those modifications, you can reset the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref via the right-click context menu and use Reset to get the default value back to start using the storage\moz-safe-about+home folder again.

I did everything venturous you said - many thanks for the detaied response as I am not an expert. I ran into a problem because before posting my own question I was confused by an earlier Q/A and had already deleted the storage\moz-safe-about+home folder in the Firefox profile folder. Anyway it has not worked. Is there anythiing I can do to restore this folder before starting the process again?

Sorry it is so complicated, that is why I first suggested just changing the homepage to anything other than the default.

Did you close the Firefox browser window before deleting that folder?

Also, that folder is created the next time Firefox is launched; as long as the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref is rendered ineffective the new folder won't have any data, and Firefox will use the default snippets - no new snippets can be sent by Mozilla.

Deleting the storage\moz-safe-about+home folder only work if you first have disabled loasading snippets by setting the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref to an empty string on the about:config page.

That is one of the snippets that are shown on the about:home page.

Another way to disable snippets:

You can use these steps to disable the snippets on the about:home page:

• Set the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref to an empty string on the about:config page
• Open the about:home page in a tab
• Open Web Console in this tab (Firefox menu button or Tools > Web Developer)
  https://developer.mozilla.org/Tools/Web_Console
• Run this command via the command prompt of the web console:
  gSnippetsMap.clear()
• Close the tab with the about:home page
• Close and restart Firefox

the-edmeister

Brilliant! I have succeeded! I did not realise I had to open Storage/Persistant to find storage\moz-safe-about+home to delete. A million thanks. This solved my problem.