That's pretty ironic coming from a company whose main value proposition is "we aren't assholes like other tech companies are." That and the annoying crap you have to disable when you install Firefox to get a blank new tab page.
The simplest way is to click the gear on the new tab page and uncheck items you don't want. If you uncheck everything you will still have the gear icon present. If you want to hide that then your are in userChrome.css territory.
(Still better than Google, though.)