A lot of extension APIs are not available on mobile.

New tabs on Android show a set of panels, same as the home page or when you tap the address bar. You can blank the screen in those three situations by hiding the panels, but there's no way to limit that to new tabs.

If you want to experiment with panels, go to:

menu button > Settings > General > Home

Then tap items in the Panels section to control their visibility.

Thank you jscher. Success.

I had tried changing the settings on panels, but could not figure out how to get at their settings. Your tip of using menu button > Settings > General > Home got me to the brink. Tinkered with the choices available, like so:

https://user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net/uploads/images/2019-07-07-20-39-12-b337ef.png

After tapping those settings in, backed out of the settings menu, then clicked the + button at the right end of the tab bar, and up came blank tab:

https://user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net/uploads/images/2019-07-07-20-43-18-c4d76b.png

jscher2000 wrote: A lot of extension APIs are not available on mobile.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder about browser makers and web technology. Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop. Two things:

1 - if mobile is the more frequently used type of device, why is functionality for mobile treated as 2nd priority to non-mobile?

2 - I can understand that some browser features/APIs do not apply to mobile. Behavior of browser tabs is not one of them.

So, what is the reason for leaving default tab flexibility out of the android edition of FireFox?

Finally, I get the feeling that browser makers want to avoid tabs opening as blanks. I wonder if the browser makers think using the new browser tab to push content not requested by a user is more important than letting users decide how their screens should be filled.

I wonder what fraction of all tabs opened on all browsers show content that is selected as the next destination in a user's surf stream. I bet that nearly all new browser tabs windows are used for something not included in the content served up by non-blank new tabs/windows. That would not be so bad, except setting those new tabs and windows to blank is always a hassle and non-intuitive.

Any idea on where click data in new browser tabs is available?

I don't know whether browser makers track use of the features on the new tab page. I personally use the address bar to access bookmarks and frequently visited sites rather than the icons, but based on questions posted here over the years, many people prefer the icons.

The Add-ons team has a forum where you might be able to find out about plans for APIs on Android: https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/add-ons