Firefox – How to make Firefox show the most visited sites when opening a new window

browser-tabsfirefox

When I start Firefox, or I open a new window, I get shown the default home screen, like this:

Firefox home screen

How do I set it to the much more useful list of most visited sites, which shows up when I open a new tab, and looks like this?

_{(source: mozilla.net)}

Go to Edit > Preferences, and set your home page to about:newtab.

Enable or disable the Google new tab page

Click the Toolbar's wrench icon.
On the Search tab, select (or deselect) the 'Enable the Google new tab page' checkbox.
Click Save.

Check the documentation for "Places query URIs".

The "Most Visited" button is a bookmark to:

place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10

If you created a new bookmark to the same URI but change the "maxResults" parameter, you can increase the number of results returned.

Sort order can also be changed. 8 means "Sort by visit count, descending".

For your 2nd request, I'm not sure it can be implemented. Play with the "type" parameter, maybe 0, 1 or 2.