Why don't you try removing Facebook from your search history, if you don't use Facebook. Or check if you have accidentally added the shortcut yourself, while removing the shortcut the first time. If no one else responds to your query, then just ignore the shortcut and use the bookmark tab., or search for a online tutorial on customizing the home page.

The Facebook shortcut is part of a group of popular site shortcuts you get as a starter set; it is not one of the sponsored tiles.

If you "Dismiss" the shortcut, it should be added to a list of sites blocked from the built-in Firefox Home / new tab page and not return. Has Dismiss worked for the other sites in the starter set (Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube)?

If dismissed URLs keep coming back, it's possible that Firefox is having a problem updating the prefs.js settings file, or something is clearing the file. This article discusses some issues related to that problem: How to fix preferences that won't save.

By the way, how are you inserting the photo into the page background?

Hi, thanks for the replies. @Bhupesh: I should start by saying i know my way around firefox, also i don't visit facebook, i did not "accidentaly" add facebook either. I really want it gone forever, no idea why it keeps coming back. Before this happened i didn't have any empty tiles, so it wasn't an issue, now im puzzled. @jscher2000: Indeed, the facebook shortcut doesn't look like the sponsored ones, the context menu is different from what i could gather. I don't have any other shortcuts coming up, twitter or reddit. As far as it not being able to update prefs.js, i can say that changes to settings and tiles/links etc persist through startups, so it seems unlikely that could be the problem. How do i disable the popular sites in about:config ? could not find a setting for it.

Photo in background: Inside UserContent.css:

/* about:blank|newtab|home */ @-moz-document regexp("about:(blank|newtab|home)") { .outer-wrapper { background-image: url("file:///C:/Tools/FFbkgnd0.jpg")!important; background-position: center!important; background-size: cover!important; } }

How do i disable the popular sites in about:config ? could not find a setting for it.

There is a preference that stores the URLs but editing it doesn't see to have any effect. Maybe if you clear or modify the list and then dismiss FB it won't come back?

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.default.sites

So your post led me to "browser.newtabpage.blocked" which is the line that stores the dismissed icons, which then led me to that line on my own "user.js". In case you guys don't know, when present, the file user.js overwrites the prefs.js. The problem here was that i left this line in the file: "user_pref("browser.newtabpage.blocked", "{\"K00ILysCaEq8+bEqV/3nuw==\":1,\"gLv0ja2RYVgxKdp0I5qwvA==\":1,\"T9nJot5PurhJSy8n038xGA==\":1,\"eV8/WsSLxHadrTL1gAxhug==\":1,\"B7ZoGLxBb+zSeH5IpLA3qw==\":1,\"QNy6V2Ccz7RBQXhdWoLwUA==\":1,\"BfRQIyL65DlfvrvvcEse4g==\":1,\"C0q4wlK86a5eSjo3+hB/Yg==\":1,\"Wzd+YFCPSKYzZPBGt81FSQ==\":1,\"mZmevP23jfB3rScn/QCWnw==\":1,\"nwl+Z6sg4xS+mZsjUrG7Xg==\":1,\"gK1ChBgXbkfqC/RchYvycA==\":1,\"dDnt6zhlehy9z2PJzmlO9w==\":1}");" It's a bunch of jibberish, but i used a comparing software and after i excluded facebook, i would have this line with an extra item, in prefs.js. So anytime i opened firefox, this line in user.js, which did not contain facebook, would overwrite the same line in prefs.js, so firefox assumed i did not exclude it.

Sorry for the long post, thank you for the help!

Aha! That's an unusual scenario.