731157 - [New Tab Page] thumbnails disappear when switching to private browsing mode

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120227 Firefox/13.0a1

When opening a new tab in private browsing, none of the sites in the grid will display thumbnails.
While this seems normal as the cache doesn't seem to be used, the page does not look very user friendly for a first experience with Private browsing. 
Wouldn't showing a blank new tab page or the private browsing notification fit in better with browsing in private?

FTR, Chrome displays a notification when opening a new tab in incognito mode.

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

So a better Summary would rather be "disable the New Tab Page in Private Browsing Mode", no?

Comment 2

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Yes.

What does the UX team think about this proposal? We could just switch to 'about:blank' when we're in private browsing mode. Otherwise it might make sense to display an immutable 'about:newtab' page when in PB mode to give you access to your bookmarks/sites.

Comment 3

[u428464]

What Chrome does isn't bad : it always display the private browsing message when a new tab is opened.

Comment 4

[Chris Lee [:clee]]

As an easy fix for this, we can default to 'about:blank' for a new tab when the user is in private mode. 

Longer term, we can be more explicit about private mode and messaging.

Comment 5

[Raymond Lee [:raymondlee]]

Attachment: v1

Tim: do you think it would be better to create a new JSM.  This singleton class would has a observer to listen to private-browsing preference and update the "browser.newtab.url" when needed?

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Comment on attachment 617828 [details] [diff] [review]
v1

Add-ons can modify browser.newtab.url, so you don't want to just clobber it.

Secondly, changing browser.newtab.url isn't going to be compatible with the private browsing mode becoming window-specific.

Finally, is this still needed at all with the upcoming custom thumbnail storage?

Comment 7

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Comment on attachment 617828 [details] [diff] [review]
v1

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #6)
> Finally, is this still needed at all with the upcoming custom thumbnail
> storage?

Actually, yes, this should be solved with the new storage as we're able to show thumbnails then. Let's not continue to work on this but wait for the storage to be fixed.

Comment 8

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Fixed by bug 744388.