1506643 - When opening new tabs and windows never load "about:newtab" but "about:blank"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Remote Protocol :: Marionette, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

We never disabled the new tab page and as such it will always get loaded when opening a new tab or window. Side-effect is that we will see additional process changes for our registered framescript, and causes race conditions like bug 1503027. It may also cause negative impacts to our performance.

This feature was enabled by default 7 years ago by bug 716538!

To turn it off we only have to set the preference `browser.newtabpage.enabled` to false.

Note, that also the to implement "New Window" WebDriver command also expects to see all tabs and windows being opened with "about:blank".

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=eb00cd64d93425027919ef89bd1cf10d7cf2d303

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Last try was busted. Here a new build:

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=3a124e19cff0e6a0adc22dad905cf29b0a8dd510&selectedJob=211255248

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Attachment: Bug 1506643 - [marionette] Disable "about:newtab" page, and always load "about:blank". r?ato

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/88fb9e85339c
[marionette] Disable "about:newtab" page, and always load "about:blank". r=ato

Comment 5

[Cosmin Sabou [:CosminS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/88fb9e85339c

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

The top intermittent bug 1503027 is no longer present since this patch landed on the integration branches. It would be a good time now to uplift the test-only patch to beta and esr60. Thanks.

Comment 7

[Cristian Brindusan [:cbrindusan]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/fd2d28382204

Comment 8

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-esr60/rev/580a7ea06a11

Comment 9

[Ionuț Goldan [:igoldan]]

Many AWSY perf improvements noticed! \0/

== Change summary for alert #17534 (as of Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:11:33 GMT) ==

Improvements:

 11%  Resident Memory windows7-32 opt stylo                               554,407,015.25 -> 491,195,086.79
  5%  JS windows10-64-qr opt stylo                                        117,338,453.12 -> 111,258,011.89
  5%  JS windows7-32 opt stylo                                            85,537,254.95 -> 81,232,746.85
  5%  Images linux64 opt stylo                                            5,155,336.15 -> 4,897,818.78
  5%  JS windows10-64 opt stylo                                           116,381,959.09 -> 110,613,749.35
  5%  JS osx-10-10 opt stylo                                              116,666,969.23 -> 110,898,770.59
  5%  JS linux64 opt stylo                                                115,002,200.45 -> 109,572,559.76
  5%  JS windows10-64 pgo stylo                                           116,038,653.33 -> 110,682,626.96
  4%  JS linux64-qr opt stylo                                             115,198,980.91 -> 110,114,465.94
  4%  JS windows7-32 pgo stylo                                            85,267,845.60 -> 81,511,343.79
  4%  JS linux64-stylo-sequential opt stylo-sequential                    114,588,548.38 -> 109,635,243.36
  4%  Explicit Memory windows10-64 pgo stylo                              332,864,742.94 -> 318,677,155.50
  4%  Explicit Memory windows10-64 opt stylo                              332,013,331.98 -> 318,334,639.84
  4%  Resident Memory linux64-stylo-sequential opt stylo-sequential       600,514,290.98 -> 575,955,355.61
  4%  Resident Memory windows10-64 pgo stylo                              506,314,933.32 -> 485,813,445.01
  4%  Images osx-10-10 opt stylo                                          5,647,657.69 -> 5,424,671.30
  4%  Resident Memory windows10-64 opt stylo                              501,334,897.57 -> 481,830,712.86
  4%  Explicit Memory osx-10-10 opt stylo                                 363,771,123.75 -> 350,324,478.67
  4%  Explicit Memory linux64 opt stylo                                   363,821,276.64 -> 350,635,094.96
  4%  Explicit Memory linux64-stylo-sequential opt stylo-sequential       357,966,949.31 -> 345,183,268.04
  3%  Explicit Memory windows7-32 opt stylo                               263,224,918.66 -> 254,102,417.66
  3%  Heap Unclassified windows10-64 pgo stylo                            44,173,188.46 -> 42,663,255.37
  3%  Explicit Memory windows10-64-qr opt stylo                           359,756,193.49 -> 347,809,798.07
  3%  Explicit Memory windows7-32 pgo stylo                               262,435,836.37 -> 254,282,106.70
  3%  Heap Unclassified windows10-64 opt stylo                            44,102,933.35 -> 42,776,004.12
  3%  Heap Unclassified linux64-stylo-sequential opt stylo-sequential     73,860,115.91 -> 71,849,980.23
  3%  Heap Unclassified linux64 opt stylo                                 74,770,410.53 -> 72,880,594.45

For up to date results, see: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/alerts?id=17534

Comment 10

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Hm, I'm not particular sure why we see all those perf improvements because the change I made only affects Marionette tests, and specifically when we open new tabs/windows. 

Joel and Gijs, do you have an idea why we get all those improvements? I mean it's great, but I simply don't understand it.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Yeah, the perf change should be related to something else. Ionut, can you doublecheck? Maybe something else in the merge did this?

Comment 12

[Bobby Holley (:bholley)]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #11)
> Yeah, the perf change should be related to something else. Ionut, can you
> doublecheck? Maybe something else in the merge did this?

I had a look at the graphs, and came to the same conclusion as Ionut.

As discussed with Eric yesterday on IRC, I'm pretty sure this is because AWSY uses Marionette, and so we're effectively no longer measuring about:newtab with AWSY. That's not great, because it makes AWSY less representative of real-world usage. Henrik, is it straightforward to revert this change for AWSY specifically?

Comment 13

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I don't know AWSY in that detail but it should be able to easily set this preference to `true` before starting Firefox. Eric, can you or Bob have a look at this?

For bare Marionette tests, and for users of Selenium and other web testing frameworks we want to keep it as is.

Comment 14

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

From my understanding awsy uses the following json files https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/awsy/conf/ to set prefs. I'm not sure how they interact with the default prefs from marionette however.

Comment 15

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

I filed bug 1507267 to get the preference added back for awsy.