SeleniumHQ/selenium — pull request #118 by apollo13 (2013-09-18 14:48:52+00:00)
Title: Disable newtabpage and open a blank window instead.

Firefox has this newtabpage since a few versions where it generates screenshots of visited pages; to do so it does make extra requests to your site which makes it hard to debug selenium requests if you see firefox requests in between… By disabling this feature tests might run a bit faster too.