This tutorial will show you in just a few steps how to disable this.
This problem occurs maybe only for people having the “Top Sites” unselected in their Firefox home page (which is my case and the case of another user), see this Mozilla support page.
In order to disable this new deplorable functionality, there are two different ways:
Weird… I have done these modifications with 85.0.2. In about:config, can’t you find browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored or something similar? I have now update Firefox to its 86.0 version and it is still present there…
You are probably and unfortunately right. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt… Instead of doing that, they could have done a crowdfunding campaign like Wikipedia regularly does in order to make public their financial needs.
Or maybe try to set browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites temporarly and again to true and see if method 2 is still useful (or if the “Sponsored Top Sites” line reappears in your preferences menu).
Thanks for your efforts. None of the above works for me (or in version 86.0-1, for that matter). It’s not that important to me in order to install any extensions as a remedy.
Maybe somebody else on testing will chime in and either confirm it working or not…
UPDATE: I managed to get rid of the sponsored sites eventually by keyword-search ‘urlbar’ and ‘search’ in about:config and toggling/removing everything that looked suspicious (a bunch and a few at a time, so can’t say which one did the trick in the end)…
I just went thorough the list, for interest sake, and I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s because of either browser.urlbar.suggest.topsites or services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.urlbar.suggest.topsites.
There is, however, no way to confirm this, seeing as I haven’t gotten this behavior and am not going to do anything on purpose that might bring it back.