1423256 - Missing favicon and/or title for some tabs (navigate, session restore, home button, duplicate, move window)

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P2)

Description

[Ciprian Muresan [:cmuresan], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: IMG_05122017_183735_0.png

[Affected versions]:
- Firefox 59.0a1 Build ID 20171204234137

[Affected Platforms]:
- All Windows
- All Mac
- All Linux

[Prerequisites]:
- browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled is set to true in about:config on a clean new profile.

[Steps to reproduce]:
1. Start the browser with the profile from prerequisites.
2. Navigate to a website and open a new tab.
3. Switch back to the previous tab.
4. Restart the browser from the browser console (shift+f2).
5. Observe the New Tab.
 
[Expected results]:
- "New Tab" title is displayed. 

[Actual results]:
- Only the favicon is displayed.

[Notes]:
- The issue is also reproducible when you close and reopen the browser with the "Show my windows and tabs from last time" option enabled.
- The issue is also reproducible with on about:home, but in about:home's case "about:home" is displayed.
- Attached a screen recording of the issue.

[Regression Range]:
Initial breakage:

Last good revision: bc8f24ca5bb3abdab417af45017b91a9a44a0745
First bad revision: def95432b0a17a1b29bef1e6aea9305d69572fb9
Pushlog:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=bc8f24ca5bb3abdab417af45017b91a9a44a0745&tochange=def95432b0a17a1b29bef1e6aea9305d69572fb9

More breakage:

Last good revision: 12a26fcdf0d426093302b22c3aa87dbd4057b5fe
First bad revision: 923256103e56c8f061abe44a47173b0709f2d56a
Pushlog:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=12a26fcdf0d426093302b22c3aa87dbd4057b5fe&tochange=923256103e56c8f061abe44a47173b0709f2d56a

Comment 1

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Potentially bug 1422074 will make things worse as not only do we rely on Firefox to set the appropriate title, we'll rely on Firefox to set the icon.

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

The specific change that removed the <title>: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3755/files#diff-92b55e4a266df72d234dd8551ab6ca10L209

Comment 3

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

If we'd bring the <title> back then we could revert bug 1422246 as well. I didn't realize this was a regression specific to activity stream.

Comment 4

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] from comment #3)
> If we'd bring the <title> back then we could revert bug 1422246 as well. I
> didn't realize this was a regression specific to activity stream.

If we back out bug 1422246, instead of an empty title you'll see "about:newtab". You should really bring the <title> back.

Comment 5

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #1)
> Potentially bug 1422074 will make things worse as not only do we rely on
> Firefox to set the appropriate title, we'll rely on Firefox to set the icon.

This btw regresses the old non-AS about:newtab page. It doesn't have an icon anymore.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (out for now; he/him)]

This is uncannily similar to bug 1394012 (but about:newtab instead of about:blank). If we understand how this bug is caused, can we also fix that bug once we have a fix for AS?

Comment 7

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Attachment: nightly 20171218 restore about:blank/home/newtab vs just opened

Here's restoring one tab each of about:blank/home/newtab then the about:preferences (also restored and focused). Then opening those 3 tabs in a new tab. (Ignore the missing favicon of about:home to be fixed in bug 1422903.)

Given the patch for bug 1422246:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/923256103e56

… seems like a somewhat expected behavior of the code. Although the session restore fix should probably have all of blank/home/newtab set the icon (?) and title of the tab?

Activity Stream was told to remove these in-page declarations to avoid flicker during startup.

Comment 8

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Do we know what our next steps are here?

Comment 9

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

The fix on the activity stream side is to restore the <link icon> and <title> tags, but we want to avoid regressing bug 1401955 and its related flickering bugs as per bug 1426916 comment 2.

To do that, we could probably special case the icon updating browser code to not do the update if the icon is already set / the same?

From the P2 prioritization, this regression is something we must fix for 59.

Comment 12

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/3922

Comment 13

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream

https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/commit/2ee4339c4eac94065e0776942ac4d627e8de1a7b
Fix Bug 1423256 - Add title and link elements to AS html.

Comment 15

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/aaf6de934ea6

Comment 18

[Mohammad Maruf Rahman]

I have reproduced this bug with Nightly 59.0a1  (2017-12-05) on Ubuntu 12.04 , 64 Bit!

This bug's fix is verified with latest Beta!

Build ID   : 20180125163041
User Agent : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0

Comment 19

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Firefox: 60.0a1, Build ID 20180131220303

I have verified that this issue is no longer reproducible on Windows 10 x64, Ubuntu 14.04 x64 and Mac 10.12, with Nightly (59.0a1 from 2018-01-21) and with the latest Nightly (60.0a1) builds installed. Now the favicon and the title are displayed.