The program browsing Firefox features a secret filter that prevents adult websites from appearing on the new tabs page, thereby exposing private browsing habits to close friends, strangers, and family.
The filter is not new, it is dated by 2014, but was recently detected by some Redditors.
In its current form, the filter prevents the thumbnails / tiles that lead to adult sites from appearing in the Top Sites and Highlights section of each new Firefox tab.
This means that if you tend to 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 privacy of users but purely commercial.
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The filter was first developed and applied to 2014. At that time, Firefox's New Tab contained a section called Sponsored Tiles, which was used as a way of displaying ads as well as for viewing some of the pages frequently visited by the user.
The Mozilla Foundation developers added the filter because their commercial partners bought it content they don't want side tabs to contain content from adult sites.
Η mode Sponsored Tiles was eventually removed, but the adult filter remained and is now part of Firefox's new New Tab page.
The feature is turned on by default, but you can disable it from the Firefox settings page:
Open the about: config internal address and look for the "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.filterAdult" setting. If you set the value to false, you will see the adult tiles again.
The blocked filter list contains 2.919 URLs encoded in Base64 MD5 hashes.
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