1112018 - Suggestion to make the new tab page more organized

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[John Smith]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20141211142524

Steps to reproduce:

Open the new tab page.


Actual results:

When you frequently visit many pages within the same site, each of them will get an individual thumbnail on the new tab page, which is very messy.


Expected results:

The pages should be grouped by domain/subdomain, displaying only one thumbnail that points to the homepage of that site, similar to what Chrome and IE do.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

I thought the page already did this... Drew?

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I thought so too!  But looking at my own newtab page it's clearly not happening.

Bug 990322 did squash URLs so that only one URL per eTLD+1 would appear, but then bug 1045760 quickly reverted that in favor of a much weaker form of squashing: http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/modules/NewTabUtils.jsm?rev=6776f88e29be#1169

Comment 3

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

Can we get away with more squashing here without breaking the requirements for bug 1045760, and if so, can you outline how much, so that we can backlog and fix this? :-)

Comment 4

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Bug 1045760 seems like not a great solution to the problem described there, but I may be missing some context, and I CC'ed Ed and Dao in case they have thoughts.  If the problem is only enhanced tiles, then maybe we could still squash eTLD+1's that don't map to any enhanced tile.  I'll take a look.

Comment 5

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: squash eTLD+1's except for dontSquash links

Ed, what do you think of this?  Go back to squashing eTLD+1's ("base domains"), but introduce link.dontSquash so the provider can say, Don't squash mah links.  Note that the filter() function still adds dontSquash'ed links to the baseDomains set, so if a mozilla.org dontSquash link is ordered before a non-dontSquash mozilla.org link, then the latter won't appear.  Not sure whether that's good or not.

If you think this is fine, then maybe extractSite should be moved to DirectoryLinksProvider.jsm?

Comment 6

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

There were various complaints about having subdomains squashed into a single tile like bug 1045760 comment 5. E.g., bugzilla, mdn, www, amo, air, etc. all squashed into whichever mozilla.org link was highest.

To be clear, the current functionality shows one tile per subdomain squashing multiple links with different paths to the higher ranked link.

That seems to match up with comment 0's expected "The pages should be grouped by domain/subdomain"

Comment 7

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Hmm, I think I jumped to conclusions from comment 0.

John, are you asking for www.mozilla.org/foo and www.mozilla.org/bar to be squashed into the same tile, or are you asking for foo.mozilla.org and bar.mozilla.org to be squashed into the same tile?  As Ed says, the former should be happening now but not the latter, by design.

Comment 8

[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!