Hello,try do this Open your HTML page normal(double click on the file), so copy the address of address bar(the path of your fiile), then at the address bar, type "about:config", press enter, yes i will be caution(some look like this,sorry i dont have FX in english), in the search bar, type "browser.newtab.url" and at the option that will appear click with right button mouse and click on edit... or double click on the option, change its value to a copy address(address of your file, that you copied), click on OK, and test

Sorry my bad english!!

Thanks

I don't think that it is possible to add local pages to the about:newtab page.
Firefox opens the page for me if I drag a local item in a tile.

It also does not work to manually add it to the browser.newtabpage.pinned preference. Presumably there's a reason for it...

I assume that it is a scheme limitation and only http and https are allowed.

You could try to add the local page via a http://localhost/ link

I think the reason is about security, so that a virus can't substitute a local fake copy of a web page for a real website on the new tab page. For me personally this policy is annoying, because I have five web pages full of links that I use instead of bookmarks, and it would be very useful to have some of those pages on my new tab page. Oh well. I could probably set up a web server on my computer, or I could copy the pages to an internet web server, or I could use toddy_victor's suggestion of replacing the new tab page with one of my pages. I will probably do that.

toddy_victor, your English is easy to understand, and thank you for your help.

Thank you very much everyone for considering my problem, and I wish you all the joy of the holiday season, and best wishes for 2014!

Hi nature.boy67, if you don't update those pages very often, as a workaround you could put them in cloud storage on Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. (setting the page to hidden).

There is one major difference, though: for file:// pages, Firefox does not send the address of the page to sites as the referring page. With http:// pages it will, which could lead to your pages being discovered. If you use https:// for your pages, Firefox will only send the referring page address to other secure sites. Still might not be private enough. The next workaround would be to add some script to the page to load the links using window.open() instead of as regular links. If you want to try that, a volunteer probably could whip something up.

Hi jscher2000, so if I understand your suggestion correctly, you're saying to remotely host a web page that has a piece of Javascript that immediately loads the local web page. Clever! The remote web page could have an image that's a snapshot. I could write a script that updates the remote page, and the snapshot, whenever the local HTML page changes!

Ah, it's fun to be a programmer ;) Well all that seems like too much work. I'm not so concerned about keeping the pages hidden, I just like having local pages because they load instantly, and I don't depend on a remote server to serve up my equivalent of bookmarks.

By the way, I tried toddy_victor's idea of replacing the new tab page with one of my pages. There's one unpleasant side-effect. If I go to type a URL, the URL bar has my "file://" URL in it, so I have to double-click that URL and press the <Delete> key to type a different URL. Or if I forget, I start typing the URL I want onto the end of the "file://" URL.

I'll probably restore the stock new tab page and host my local HTML files on a remote web server.

Thanks again! I'm impressed by the thoughtful responses from this community. It seems to be a good one ;)

Hi nature.boy67, I had something simpler in mind. Here's a page that demonstrates how to use one script to launch the links in your page without showing the referring page: http://dev.jeffersonscher.com/links.html.

Oh I get it, the DOM object representing the HTML body gets a new handler for click events. The new handler checks to see what was clicked on, and if it's a link or an image wrapped in a link then it opens the link. The code checks to see if there is a 'target="_blank"', or if the user Control-clicked or Shift-clicked, and if so the new page opens in a new window, otherwise the existing window is recycled to load the new page. If the handler processes a link it runs event.preventDefault() and returns false, which I imagine cancels any further action based on the click. If the element clicked on wasn't a link, then the event handler doesn't do anything.

I thought that there must surely be undesirable side-effects to the code, but the only side-effect I could find is that Shift-clicking on a link opens the link in a new tab instead of a new page. That to me is a very desirable side-effect. I've recently switched from the Opera browser, which can be configured to always open pages in new tabs, and I wish Firefox could be configured the same way. (It took me a little while to learn to Control-click links instead of Shift-clicking.)

That is clever code, and I'll certainly add it to any of my link pages that I host via HTTP or HTTPS. I see by the similiar work on your website that you're the author of that Javascript, and I'll be happy to give you full credit. Thanks very much for your help!