Firefox – Disable “Messages from Firefox” on new tab page

Similar to Bevan's answer, but a little different. Two options you have.

In your Firefox options, Main tab, General section, set Firefox to start up with a blank page. Set your homepage, however to iGoogle. Whenever you open up Firefox, you'll be greeted by a blank page that doesn't steal your focus. If you want iGoogle, just click Home or hit Alt+Home.

Alternatively, which may or may not be better or for you, is to set your homepage to be

about:blank|http://www.google.com/ig

This will essentially load a blank screen in the first tab for you to go anywhere you want while iGoogle loads in the background. Want to just go to iGoogle? CTRL+F4 to close the blank screen, or a CTRL+Tab to switch tabs. I take it there's a reason you have iGoogle as your home page, which is why I mentioned this alternative.

Other than that, there's no Firefox option to prevent a page from taking focus; while there's a userscript called Focus Killer that says it'll prevent such behavior, my own tests indicate it only does this after the fact; i.e. iGoogle took focus away from the address bar, then a bit later Focus Killer took focus away from iGoogle. In the end, there was no focus on the address bar.

Only other option would be to disable scripts from running, but I don't think you'd want that at all.

An annoying problem, I feel your pain (they'd do this during Gmail sign on while I was typing my password, so that it'd mess up both fields and show a large portion of my password due to me not stopping in time). This is the best I can come up with.

Enable or disable the Google new tab page

1. Click the Toolbar's wrench icon.

   

2. On the Search tab, select (or deselect) the 'Enable the Google new tab page' checkbox.
3. Click Save.

Google Help Article With Video