1475785 - Activity stream is trying to capture thumbnails even when a blank page is set as home and newtab page

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P3)

Description

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User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0
Build ID: 20180713220354

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a new profile and start Firefox with it.
2. Dismiss all the pre-existing topsites (Wikipedia, YouTube etc).
3. Add as a topsite (and pin it) a site with known to you IP address, or add an (existing) IP address directly: eg. I don't use Google's DNS, so I added 8.8.8.8.
4. Open the settings of the newtab page (Preferences > Home) and set both the "Homepage and new windows" and "New tabs" to "Blank Page".
5. Clear all cookies, site data and history ("Clear Data..." and "Clear History" in Privacy & Security of Preferences).
6. Close Firefox.
7. Open Wireshark or a similar tool.
8. Open Firefox and observe the connections from and to your system.


Actual results:

Activity stream tries to retrieve a thumbnail and connections to the IP of the pinned topsite added in step 3 are logged in step 7.


Expected results:

When a user deselects the checkboxes to disable some or all sections of activity stream, it (the activity-stream) doesn't try to retrieve any thumbnail (eg. for topsites or highlights). I would have expected that setting the homepage and newtabpage to blank (as in step 4) to behave the same way (ie. to not try to capture any thumbnails, since they won't be displayed anywhere).