The Firefox browser has a secret filter that prevents adult websites from appearing on the new tab page, thereby exposing private browsing habits to close friends, strangers, and family.
The filter is not new, dating back to 2014, but was recently spotted by some Redditors.
In its current form, the filter prevents thumbnails/tiles that lead to adult websites from appearing in the Top Sites and Highlights section of every new Firefox tab.
This means that if you regularly visit such websites (intentionally or completely by accident), these pages will remain hidden and will not appear when you open a new tab in Firefox.
The reasons behind this filter are not the protection of users' privacy, but purely commercial.
The filter was first developed and implemented in 2014. At the time, Firefox's New Tab contained a section called Sponsored Tiles, which were used as a way to display advertisements and to display certain pages that the user frequently visited.
Mozilla developers added the filter because their commercial partners who purchased content don't want the side tabs to contain content from adult sites.
The Sponsored Tiles feature was eventually removed, but the adult filter remained and is now part of Firefox's new New Tab page.
The feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it from the Firefox settings page:
Open the internal about:config address and search for the setting “browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.filterAdult.” If you set the value to false, you will see the adult tiles again.
The list that the filter blocks contains 2,919 URLs encoded in Base64 MD5 hashes.
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