What type of "background"?

If you are referring to "themes", see this. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/

My home page is now Firefox. I see a little fox curled up, probably ashamed to show his face because his creation is so lame. I want to put a different picture there as a background, like a seashore. If I put it in a tab, then it won't be there when I first launch Firefox. And even if I did put the seashore in the tab, what good does that do me; when I open up the tab which has my seashore background, then I won't see the entry box for searching.

So, you want to change the homepage. See - How to set the home page

Or maybe you want the New Tab page as your homepage? Open about:newtab and set that as your homepage using the information in the above support article.

If I create a tab that does absolutely nothing except look pretty, how does that help me.

For the new tab page, see:

• New Tab Tools: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/new-tab-tools/

I don't want a new tab. I want to make the little fox go away and replace her/him with a different picture.

And there are so many other things that I want to do, but so far I just haven't figured out FireFox as a browser/homepage.

See the #brandLogo rules in this file:

• chrome://browser/content/abouthome/aboutHome.css

You can open this file via the location/address bar (chrome is a protocol; no connection with Google Chrome).

Add your own CSS code to the userChrome.css file below the default @namespace line.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/userChrome.css

Use the !important flag to override existing rules.

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* only needed once */

#brandLogo {
  background-image: url("about-logo.png") !important;
}

The customization files userChrome.css (user interface) and userContent.css (websites) are located in the chrome folder in the Firefox profile folder.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Editing_configuration

Place the new image in the chrome folder with the userChrome.css file

Why would anyone want to protect their brand so desperately; I thought that FireFox was open source; those lines of code would be characteristic of a capitalist attitude. This doesn't really help much. I am not going fiddle with the code just over the sweet little fox.

What I really need is to be able to put widgets on my home page. I see that I might be able to do an RSS feed; I haven't finished trying to put it in yet. But I notice that I look for "bookmarks" in the Add-On "catelog" and I get nothing.