1257454 - 'Open in new tab' creates the new tab, but with a blank preview in tab overview.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[scott]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open any page 
2. Select to open an article or other content from that page in a new tab by pressing and holding the link and selecting 'open in new tab'
3. Navigate to the tab overview



Actual results:

The newly opened tab in the background does not show a website preview.


Expected results:

Opening tabs in the background should also show a tab preview in the tab overview, even if the user has yet to visit that site.

Comment 1

[Flaviu Cos]

Tested on all branches (Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release) and could not reproduce. The website preview appear after 2-3 seconds in the tab overview.
Tested using Nexus 5 (Android 6.0.1).

What device did you used when this issue appeared?
What Android version does it have?
On what Firefox version did you find this issue?

Comment 2

[scott]

Hi,

I was using a Samsung Galaxy S6 with Android 6.9 (Marshmallow).

The Firefox version was the latest build on the Play Store (45.0).

Comment 3

[Flaviu Cos]

I tested on Firefox 45 from the Play Store using a Galaxy S6 with Android 6.0.1 and the issue does not reproduce.
After the link is opened in a new tab the page is loaded in background. After the page is loaded the page preview will show up in the tab overview.
While in tab overview try to wait a few seconds for the page preview to show up.

Comment 4

[scott]

You are correct, after c.a 3-8 seconds the preview is displayed.

I guess the question would remain if the delay is intended?

Comment 5

[Flaviu Cos]

The page preview is generated only after the page is fully loaded in background.
The waiting time can be affected by the network speed and the page complexity.

Closing the bug as worksforme.

Comment 6

[Philip Hill]

I can continuously reproduce this on a Nexus 5x with Android 6.0.1 and Firefox for Android 46.0b2 (current beta from play store) connected via Wifi right next to a 5g access point with a quite fast uplink connected to it.

I go to http://m.faz.net and take my time to open few of the articles in background tabs while staying on the home page. After a while (few minutes), I open the tab overview and none of the new tabs has any thumbnail. When tapping one of the new tabs, they open immediately without any hint to the page still loading.

Only occasionally, I am able to reproduce the issue with http://m.heise.de as well, but since the page load time seems significant there, it could well be due to that as well (however, it's subjectively multiple times slower than via Google Chrome).

Comment 7

[Flaviu Cos]

(In reply to Philip Hill from comment #6) 
> I go to http://m.faz.net and take my time to open few of the articles in
> background tabs while staying on the home page. After a while (few minutes),
> I open the tab overview and none of the new tabs has any thumbnail. When
> tapping one of the new tabs, they open immediately without any hint to the
> page still loading.

I can reproduce this issue using your scenario.
Looks like if the pages opened in new tabs are completely loaded in the background before opening the tabs tray the page preview will not be displayed.

Comment 8

[:Margaret Leibovic]

This sounds like a polish issue that would be good to resolve, but it's not critical. Sounds like something is just going wrong with our thumbnail logic.

snorp, do you know about tab thumbnail code, or who does?

Comment 9

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

I think Brad wrote that stuff. Dylan can you take a look at this? We need to figure out if we're taking thumbnails of the appropriate tabs, etc.

Comment 10

[Dylan Roeh (:droeh) (he/him)]

I can reproduce this as well, and it seems like this happens specifically when an ad on the page (or any other resource, presumably) fails to load for some reason. I noticed that if we time out loading an ad we do not generate a tab preview (ever, as far as I can tell), but if the ads load correctly we get a preview as expected. I'm taking a closer look at how tab previews are created to see if I can confirm that explanation and fix it.

Comment 11

[Dylan Roeh (:droeh) (he/him)]

Attachment: Proposed patch

So it turns out we only update the thumbnail if the tab overview is shown: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/ThumbnailHelper.java#220

I'm not sure why we do this, we've already done the work of capturing the thumbnail at this point. This patch just removes that check (and the now-redundant check on GeckoInterface), and it seems to work fine.

Comment 12

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/f214afd92057
Capture thumbnails for tabs even if tab overview is not currently shown. r=snorp

Comment 13

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f214afd92057

Comment 14

[Dylan Roeh (:droeh) (he/him)]

I didn't quite go far enough in that first patch -- reopening this for a second patch that should fix it entirely.

Comment 15

[Dylan Roeh (:droeh) (he/him)]

Attachment: Second proposed patch

This gets rid of the shouldUpdateThumbnail() function entirely and always calls processThumbnailData().

Comment 16

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/c61a116595bf
Remove shouldUpdateThumbnail() entirely, always call processThumbnail(). r=snorp

Comment 17

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/c61a116595bf

Comment 18

[Sorina Florean [:sflorean]]

Verified as fixed in build 50.0a1 2016-07-19;
Device: Nexus 5 (Android 6.0.1).