There are further complexities beyond user customization. The user can customize these things at any time, and any open copies of the page are expected to reflect those customizations immediately. Choose to have the Highlights composed of any of the following:.Change the number of rows in the Top Sites and Recommended by Pocket sections.Add or remove search engines from their Top Sites.Add their own custom Top Sites with custom thumbnails.Pin and unpin Top Sites to their positions.Reorganize the order of their Top Sites by dragging and dropping.It is designed to be customized by the user in the following ways: This page is actually quite sophisticated under the hood. Your about:home might look slightly different from the above - depending on your locale, it may or may not include the Pocket stories.ĭo not be fooled by what appears to be a very simple page of images and text. The fact that they have different addresses allows us to treat their loading differently.

The about:home page is actually the same thing that appears when you open a new tab (about:newtab). (Note: this is only true if the user hasn’t just restarted after applying an update, and if they haven’t set a custom home page or configured Firefox to restore their previous session on start.) In a default installation of Firefox, the first (and only) tab that loads is about:home. I’m going to describe the improvement, and how we went about integrating it. This blog post is about one of those improvements that is currently in the later stages of development. We’ve been evaluating and addressing these opportunities, and several have made it into the past few Firefox releases. Meticulous profiling of Firefox startup in various conditions has, thankfully, helped reveal a number of opportunities where we can make improvements. The launching of an application like Firefox is quite complex. Improving Firefox Startup Time With The about:home Startup Cacheįor the past year or so, the Firefox Desktop Front-End Performance team has been concentrating on making improvements to browser startup performance. We’re working on a thing to make Firefox start faster! It appears to work! Here’s a video showing off a before (left) and after (right):

What is mozilla firefox start page