1271335 - Store URLs of new content in urlannotations

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Whenever we discover new content (bug 1238087) we show a notification and after that we "throw everything away" (Well, we remember some data to detect if a future update is actually an update).

We could store the URLs in urlannotations and use this to resurface the new content somewhere in the UI later. As we are the browser we even know if the user has seen this content already of if it's still new. Yay.

Comment 1

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Nice idea, this could be nice data for content discovery within top sites.

If we eventually get more aggressive about how many sites we're watching, we could display even more content inside the app, but then only decide to make notifications when we're feeling confident an update is useful.

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian) from comment #0)

> We could store the URLs in urlannotations and use this to resurface the new
> content somewhere in the UI later. As we are the browser we even know if the
> user has seen this content already of if it's still new. Yay.

How do we expire this annotation? Sure, we could remove annotations when we visit the URL, but what about staleness? We should consider expiring the annotation after X days, or something.

This makes me think we should create guidelines for using the URLAnnotations table. Currently, I think we annotation URLs in a way that means we don't need to worry about staleness: shared, screenshot, etc. But this sounds like a new type of use case: categorizing a URL that has never been seen. We might consider building a different system for this concept so URLAnnotations doesn't become a "kitchen sink" of use cases.

Comment 3

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Content notification code was removed in bug 1396604.