1075243 - breakdown: mechanism for capturing tab thumbnails at desired size, and using those for newtab

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The goal is to fix bug 1059559.

I brainstormed an approach:
- teach both thumbnailers (foreground and background) to optionally capture newtab-sized thumbnails (which are now a fixed size)
- for the background case, have the newtab specify that it wants thumbnails of that size when the newtab requests a thumbnail from the background service
- for the foreground case, have the foreground thumbnailing code check whether the current page is a page that we display on newtab, and if so capture a newtab-sized thumbnail
- adjust the moz-page-thumb protocol handler to allow specifying that you want specifically sized thumbnail, and have the newtab page use that

We should break that approach down into individual work items and see whether it's feasible, and scope out the work.

Comment 1

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

Some background as far as I understand:

1. The (hidden) browser window which is used to capture these thumbnails is ~1000px wide (maybe 1024x768?). This might be doubled on retina displays.

2. The captured image is then immediately scaled to 1/3 screen width x 1/3 screen height, and stored this way. On a 1920x1080 screen that's 640x360.

3. The current consumers for this scaled image are:
- newtab page
- ctrl-tab (when browser.ctrlTab.previews = true)
- Panorama

4. The newtab page then renders this image at 290x180 (probably doubled for retinas). Not sure how the other consumers render it, but I think the ctrl-tab one renders it bigger than that.


When we experimented with capture (re)size of 290x180, it turned out that scaling directly from the window size (~1000px) to the newtab thumb size (290px) without the intermediate step if 1/3 screen size, the scaling quality was unsatisfactory.

It was noticeable e.g. on Apple's pages texts where they use fonts with relatively thin lines, which were not fun to look at at the newtab page, but looked fine with the 1/3 screen intermediate scaling.

We're still not sure if that's a bug or not, but this is something we'd have to deal with if we scale directly from the window size to the small newtab thumbs size.

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Just spoke to Tim, we're going to drop this bug for now.

Comment 3

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

Removed from IT 36.1

Comment 4

[Avi Halachmi (:avih)]

Does this mean the newtab page will keep resizing the thumbnails for the foreseeable future?

Comment 5

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

For this iteration we're going to concentrate on investigating the perf problems with the new preloader and try to get some feedback for the "delay showing images" patch. We will re-evaluate next iteration based on the results.

Comment 6

[Jessilyn Davis]

Hello!

This bug has been closed due to inactivity and/or the potential for this bug to no longer be an issue with the new Discovery Stream-powered New Tab experience.

Please help us triage by reopening if this issue still persists and should be addressed.

Thanks!