Closed Bug 1168465 Opened 9 years ago Closed 8 years ago

Prototype generating new tab tiles using web manifest

Categories

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
New Tab Page
Version:
40 Branch
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: marcosc, Assigned: marcosc)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug)

Details

User Story

A user opens a new tab and would like to quickly access their most visited sites. Today, however, it's difficult to distinguish between sites because the generated thumbnails are scaled-screenshots. In other instances, the resulting screenshot is unhelpful (e.g., "Site Unavailable"). The loss in fidelity from scaling makes it hard to distinguish between different sites. 

What could potentially be better would be to generate a thumbnail by using a Web Manifest's icon and associated background color. This would allow tiles to be composed that better represent sites for users and content producers.
The W3C's Web Manifest spec provides metadata about a web site that could potentially be used when generating tiles in a new tab. 

This project aims to explore if web manifests are fit for this purpose. 

In particular:

 * is the metadata provided in the manifest sufficient? 
 * how would one update a tile without compromising user's privacy?
 * is it possible to use tiles on both mobile and desktop? In particular, Google has been pushing web manifests as an installable web app solution on mobile: can those manifest be reused in a desktop context? 
 * how often should a tile be updated? 
 * should only sites that make use of TLS be allowed to use this feature? 
 * What is the fallback model when there is insufficient information in a manifest to generate a tile (e.g., fallback to using a screenshot of the site)... what should happen if an icon image is missing? 
 * Possibly other things...
Depends on: webmanifest
Assignee: nobody → mcaceres
User Story: (updated)
We finished prototyping a while back, so closing.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 8 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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