1402670 - Top Sites not synced

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1401178

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

Description

[Cameron McCormack (:heycam)]

I just bought a new phone.  On my old phone, I enabled Sync and synchronised everything.  Then on my new phone, I enabled Sync and it grabbed the synchronised data.  I expected that this would also synchronise the tiles on the Top Sites page (that is where I primarily do my navigation from), but it didn't.  Bookmarks and history did seem to be synchronised, though.

Comment 1

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Is this just that the thumbnails don't appear, or that the sites themselves aren't listed as top sites? If the former, that's sadly expected. If the latter, I *think* it might mean we haven't synced enough history.

Comment 2

[Cameron McCormack (:heycam)]

They aren't listed as top sites at all.  I started with the default set of top sites (YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) which have been slowly displaced as I browsed, but there was no sign of any of my old phone's top sites until I visit them explicitly.  (And then, they seem to be "weakly" there, i.e. I don't think the new phone knows how frequently they had been visited.)

By "we haven't synced enough history" do you mean that we don't sync entire history, but just a portion of it?  Or that it is an incremental process?

Comment 3

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Cameron McCormack (:heycam) from comment #2)
> By "we haven't synced enough history" do you mean that we don't sync entire
> history, but just a portion of it?  Or that it is an incremental process?

Desktop only syncs the last 30 days with a limit of 5000 entries. I believe iOS syncs it all incrementally. I *think* Android is closer to how desktop does it, but I don't know the values off the top of my head. We also don't sync any info about sites you might have manually "pinned" to your top-sites.

Those constants for desktop were set many years ago - we should probably have a discussion about improving that.

Comment 4

[Lina Butler (ex-Mozilla)]

From Grisha in triage: currently, all top sites must be visited on the phone. There's also a separate frecency calculation that we do to prioritize top sites, but those only apply to local visits. Synced visits will never show up in top sites, because synced Desktop history will easily overwhelm them. This might be a duplicate of an existing bug.

Comment 5

[:Grisha Kruglov]

To expand on Comment 4: if you have a mix of "local" (phone) and "remote" (desktop, other phones, same phone but from a different install, etc) visits, those that are "local" will be prioritized heavily over those that are "remote". Those visits which are "remote only" - e.g. websites that were never visited on the current device - will not show up in top sites.

So, a "new phone" is treated as a "remote" device when its visits are synced to your new phone. Unfortunately, we do not track an origin of a history visit, and so currently that's as granular as we can get in our top sites calculations.

The latest Activity Stream bug 1401178 is probably the best place for this discussion going forward.