1276515 - about:newtab is much too aggressive in fetching pages for itself

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[Nancy Grossman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160511224513

Steps to reproduce:

tl;dr? In a new profile, open several sites in new tabs, close each one before it finishes loading without allowing it to become the active tab, then open about:newtab while monitoring 'Network' in the Browser Toolbox.

1. Open Firefox with a new profile.
2. Confirm 'Tabs' settings: 'Open new windows in a new tab' checked, 'Don't load tabs until selected' checked, 'When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately' unchecked.
3. Enable the Browser Toolbox.

4. Browse to news.google.com (or any page with links to several different sites).
5. Right-click and 'Open link in new tab' for several links to different sites.
6. After each tab displays the page title but before it finishes loading, right-click the tab and 'Close tab'.

7. Open 'Network' in the Browser Toolbox.
8. Open about:newtab in a new tab (ctrl+t).


Actual results:

1. news.google.com is now one of the 'favorite sites'. None of the canceled pages were added to the favorites. [1]
2. about:newtab loads on its own behalf the pages that were canceled. [2, 3] Again, these are pages that were never completely loaded, and never viewed.

What is odd, but perhaps tangential to this issue,
3. about:newtab appears to hit the NYT's paywall (it's loading the URL on its own behalf and not news.google.com), then tries repeatedly without success to load the page [2]. (I think - idk.)



Expected results:

"Should"? I'll start with "should not". (1) about:newtab should not be loading pages that have never been visible in the active tab. (2) It should not be loading URLs that it finds in the browser history. If a thumbnail wasn't created when the page was in the active tab, then there simply won't be a thumbnail. (3) It certainly should not be pre-loading URLs for sites it won't display - it's behaving now like FasterFox from hell.

Now the "should"s: (4) about:newtab should have used a thumbnail generated when the page was in the active tab, else used a placeholder image or none at all.

Look, I should *never* see a flurry of network activity when I open newtab. Firefox should *never* waste my bandwidth downloading pages that I canceled manually. (Three guesses why I canceled them?) Newtab should not on its own behalf be renewing acquaintance with a site I visited last week or even yesterday.

At the very least these behaviors should have been broken out as individual preferences, and if you want to mimic the Win8 "Live Tiles" behavior then you should clearly explain that to users.

[1] http://s19.postimg.org/e9z337pmr/newtab.png
[2] http://s19.postimg.org/ohhmfmbur/newtab_loading_canceled_pages_html.png
[3] http://s19.postimg.org/fnqpyiow3/newtab_loading_canceled_pages_all.png

Comment 1

[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!