Hi ChristineMary, questions are archived automatically after 6 months, so you did the right thing posting a new one.

There is a separate, hidden setting for new tabs, separate from your home page setting.

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and enter your preferred page:

• Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
• Blank tab => about:blank
• Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
• Any other page => full URL to the page

Press Ctrl+t to open a new tab and verify that it worked. Fixed?

Two gotchas:

• If Firefox ignores the setting, one of your extensions may be overriding it. You can review, disable, and/or remove extensions on the add-ons page. Either:
  
  Ctrl+Shift+a
  orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
  
  Then, in the left column, click Extensions

• If the change works but at the next startup is back to the unwanted search page, you might have a user.js file in your personal Firefox settings folder (your Firefox profile folder). This article describes how to track down and remove the file: How to fix preferences that won't save.

Any luck?

Hello, Please confirm if what you are looking for is this

1. When you open Firefox, you want to see the homepage you have set
2. Every time you want to open a new tab, you want to see the thumbnails of the sites you want to visit
3. You are being prompted to use the SmartSearch, when you don't want to use this
4. You want to be able to send a screenshot of what you are looking to see on Firefox

If the above is accurate, first, to remove the SmartSearch, you can follow instructions mentioned in the following link

1. Remove smartsearch
2. Disable or remove Add-ons

To be able to attach a screenshot, you can attach the screenshot to your email you use to respond to this issue and you can send it over. Alternatively, you can visit https://support.mozilla.org and attach the image.

Once you have removed SmartSearch, please let us know if you are able to view the homepage that you wanted to set and if you are able to view the thumbnails of the most visited sites.

Thank you

By the way, if you like using Google as your search provider and Firefox's built-in home page, this extension will take care of changing your new tab setting for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fire.../searchreset/. You may still need to remove a bad extension if that doesn't work.

You can check the target line in the Firefox desktop shortcut (right-click: Properties) to make sure that nothing is appended after the path to the Firefox program.

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
All these programs have free versions.

Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

• Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
  http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
• AdwCleaner:
  http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
  http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Removal-Tools/AdwCleaner.shtml
• SuperAntispyware:
  http://www.superantispyware.com/
• Microsoft Safety Scanner:
  http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx
• Windows Defender: Home Page:
  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx
• Spybot Search & Destroy:
  http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
• Kasperky Free Security Scan:
  http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

• Anti-rootkit utility TDSSKiller:
  http://support.kaspersky.com/5350?el=88446

See also:

• "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked

This one worked. It was the first one I tried, and just so you know for future referrals, it didn't take right away. Seems on one terminal, it took after I rebooted. (Or maybe just reopened the browser, I don't remember.) With this one, I went to disable some extensions, and it wasn't clear to me which one would work, so I disabled a couple, randomly. Did the trick. One actually "panicked" and sent me a warning about whether or not I wanted to disable a tool bar and I said yes (!) Maybe that's what did it.

Anyway, thanks. I'll have to keep this string for future, just in case.

BTW, this is the first dialogue box I've been seeing, in this conversation, that actually has an upload button for me to send a screenshot. Maybe that needs to be more obvious to first-time inquirers?

RE: your btw about the google search bar... I really prefer not to use any search bar. It's just one extra step. I go straight to the address bar, usually. Sometimes I'll use the little google bar at the top right corner. But I'm more annoyed than anything else by anything that will slow me down (ie extra unneeded steps.)