1401178 - [Activity Stream] - Sites synced from desktop unexpectedly don't appear in top sites

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Activity Stream, defect, P3)

Description

[Bogdan Surd, QA [:bsurd, NI]]

Prerequisites:
Log in with the same account on your computer and your mobile device.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open Fennec on your computer;
2. Visit the same link 10 times (eg. imdb.com);
3. Perform a sync on your computer;
4. Perform a sync on your device.

Expected result:
 IMDB is displayed in the Top Sites section after sync.

Actual result:
 IMDB is not displayed in the Top Sites section in mobile after sync, the item is displayed in the history tab

Notes:
 If doing the same thing on mobile the site is displayed in Top Sites on your computer after performing a sync.

Comment 1

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

iirc, we discussed this in triage: this is unexpected and undesired. However, we have larger UX issues to look at at the moment and it touches sync, which could be a lot of work before the deadline.

fwiw, a while ago we deprioritized remote visits in top sites because when you enabled sync, you'd see a lot of synced sites you visit on desktop but won't visit on phone (e.g. gmail) instead of the sites you actually want to visit on your phone. Perhaps we deprioritized it too much!

Comment 2

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

Note: we came to the same conclusion during the bug review meeting.

Comment 3

[Chenxia Liu [:liuche]]

We discussed this again in triage, and this comes back to "different behavior of Activity Stream/Top Sites on Desktop vs Mobile".

When we originally did the Top Sites algorithm, it wasn't a great experience because the most visited sites on Desktop are usually a bunch of Facebook and Gmail links, which people on mobile have apps for, so there's a different usage case there. On mobile, if you do visit one of those sites, then it will show up (I believe). The work that we did to add this different functionality is in bug 1046709.

There's definitely a fundamental difference in how people use Desktop vs Mobile, so we should do more research on this rather than wholesale syncing everything.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Chenxia Liu [:liuche] from comment #3)

> When we originally did the Top Sites algorithm, it wasn't a great experience
> because the most visited sites on Desktop are usually a bunch of Facebook
> and Gmail links, which people on mobile have apps for, so there's a
> different usage case there.

Plus desktop browsing is typically much, much higher volume, and people's desktop browsing history is longer than their mobile device's. Treating every visit the same means desktop wins, even in the absence of Gmail and Facebook -- there are always going to be 'central' sites that are high-volume on desktop (e.g., discount shopping sites, news, Reddit, forums…).

A different perspective on Comment 0: if your mobile top sites currently reflect your mobile browsing, should a few minutes on your laptop clicking around on IMDB push it into your mobile top sites? Given pure frecency sorting, it would.

Comment 5

[Michael Comella (:mcomella) [NI reported issues only: ex-Mozilla]]

All open Activity Stream bugs are moving from the whiteboard tag, "[mobileAS]", to the Firefox for Android component, "Activity Stream", so that I can keep better track of these bugs as the new triage owner; I will send out an email shortly with additional details, caveats, etc.

Comment 7

[Jeremy]

I've been using a mozilla based browser on desktop since the netscape days, only recently did I try firefox on my phone again and I must say kudos to the team for getting through the performance hurdles on Android. I can finally dump chrome on the phone, and this makes me very happy haha.

That being said, just thought I would comment here that I do not like this sync behavior regarding top sites either. Your team has likely already discussed this but I would suggest giving the user an option to enable/disable this prioritization completely. Another idea might be a filter to pluck out major apps instead of a blanket prioritization routine.

Most if not all of my top sites on the desktop are not apps, youtube comes and goes off the list but that would be the only exception.

I also typically browse the same sites on my phone as my desktop, it's kind of a pain not having the top sites completely synced to the phone as it's much more difficult on a phone to type in the url... bookmarks could be used but that menu is less than stellar for me personally but that's a completely different topic.

I realize I'm probably not the average user in preferring a 100% non de-prioritized sync between devices and hope that my feedback helps.

Comment 8

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.