I don't know what you mean by "lightly dashed rectangles", and the New Tab Page has been around since Firefox 13.

• Customize your Firefox New Tab page

Can you explain what the problem is in more detail, and maybe include a screenshot?

• How do I create a screenshot of my problem?

I'm aware that we've had the New Tab option for a long time, and I rely on it constantly. (Come to think of it, why else would I have raised question.) The pattern, however, is brand new (along with all the other things wrong with v29). I'm attaching a screen shot, in which I've reduced brightness in Photoshop in order to bring it out in reproduction. As I say, it's not the worst thing in the world, and it goes away when I load an actual Web page, but why is it there? It's not there on the base window when I open Photoshop (or when I go back to the initial tab)>

jhaber3 wrote:

I'm attaching a screen shot

I see what you mean now. I suppose the idea was to further emphasize that the blank tiles are just placeholders and you can drag stuff on top of them.

If you find the dashed borders very bothersome, you can get rid of them with a user style.

1. Install Stylish and restart Firefox when prompted.
   • https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/stylish/
2. Click the ≡ Menu Button and choose Add-ons.
3. In the Add-ons Manager, click User Styles on the left.
4. Click the Write New Style button at the top. Paste the following in the text box, give the style a name, then click the Save button.

@-moz-document url("about:newtab") {
.newtab-cell { border-style: solid !important; }
}

If you don't want to install an add-on, you can use the userContent.css file instead, but I don't recommend it.

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

Interesting, thank you. I'm not sure I'll bother, but I appreciate the explanation.

You can set a different page as the about:newtab page if you do not want to see the grid that show recently visited websites.

You can set this page via the browser.newtab.url pref on the about:config page.

See also this article about the New Tab page (about:newtab):

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/new-tab-page-show-hide-and-customize-top-sites

Thanks much. While I really meant my post as yet another (my fourth and least important by far) complaint about the first major redesign of my favorite product in years (so why is it then all the way up to v29, where other programs and operating systems increase more incrementally? well, that's another complaint I haven't registered), I'm going with that. I've gone into about:config and changed the URL to a blank.