Somehow, my home page changed to Ask. I’m running Firefox as my browser on my macbook & it used to come up with a tiled screen of the various sites last visited. I suspect one of my kids may have somehow changed the default. How do I get it back to the way it was? Thanks in advance for your help!
Ah, those pesky kids. What I think makes them so dangerous is that they have no sense of risk, so they’ll do things that we adults would instinctively avoid, like clicking on the “reformat” button or installing software like “sneaky pete” or similar.
The best solution in the long term is to either get them their own computer or to set up multiple accounts on your MacBook so that any time they want to use it you switch accounts and whatever they do, they can’t mess up your files or preferences.
Meanwhile, let’s address your problem, shall we?
Turns out it’s pretty easy in Firefox to tweak your default home page. Launch the program and choose “Preferences…” from the “Firefox” menu:
Or you can do what I do and get used to the Cmd-, sequence.
Either way, you’ll get to your preferences:
There it is, front and center. Easiest strategy is to first go to the page you want as your home page, then click “Use Current Page”.
Your view of a tiled screen of your recently visited pages is known as the “newtab” view. You can get it by typing this in: about:newtab
Smarter, type in “about:about” and you’ll see that Firefox has a remarkable number of options:
As they say, not all of these are interesting, but there are a few… Try “about:home”, for example, and “about:healthreport” is darn interesting to check out once in a while.
Also worth noting is that you can set more than one default by separating them by a “|” symbol.
For example, want to have AskDaveTaylor as your default home page, the LA Times as a second tab, and that thumbnail view as a third tab? You can do that by setting:
Experiment with this, along with the “about:” options in Firefox, and you’ll be enjoying your browser experience even more.
And as for those pesky kids, well… 🙂