1476608 - Navigating away from a bookmarked about:newtab causes the bookmark page action icon to flash blue

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P5)

Description

[Harry Twyford]

Steps to reproduce:

1) Bookmark about:newtab.
2) Navigate away from about:newtab to a page that is not bookmarked. Clicking away to a different tab or clicking an Activity Stream item both work.
3) Notice the page action bookmark icon flashes blue. In my experience, it flashed for as long as half a second.

Not a big issue, seeing as the flash is very quick, but this behaviour is inconsistent with switching from a regular bookmarked page to a non-bookmarked page. 

Tested on two different machines/profiles, both on macOS 10.13.4, on both Nightly 63.0a1 and Release 61.0.1.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I don't see the star button in about:newtab...

Comment 2

[Harry Twyford]

I was referring to if you bookmark about:newtab some other way (Cmd+D or the bookmarks menu item) and then navigate from about:newtab to a regular page. If the regular page isn't bookmarked, the star button will flash blue. Sorry if that wasn't clear!

Comment 3

[Harry Twyford]

Attachment: screen recording - star button flash

Here's a short screen recording. You can see the star button flashes blue for a few frames when I navigate to the NYT. The length of the flash seems to vary, but anecdotally it's been as long as half a second.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Thanks, I see it.
The star updates are asynchronous, for obvious reasons, it is more visible here because the star appears from nothing.
I'm not sure what we could do here, maybe we should wait the star update before showing it, but that sounds like quite some work for a small gain.
Calling it a p5 for now, if someone has an idea for a patch we'll surely evaluate it.

Comment 5

[Kestrel]

I noticed something similar after I bookmarked about:blank, the star flashes blue every time a tab is restored. This behavior makes sense given that the icon is async and unloaded tabs start on about:blank. I only bookmarked it for testing purposes and I can't think of any practical use case.