1525437 - Telegram Web & Whatsapp Web take annoyingly long to mark messages as read

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Scrolling and Overflow, defect, P3)

Description

[kirill.rakhman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

When getting a message on Telegram Web or Whatsapp Web, I click on the respective conversation.

Actual results:

Sometimes, the conversation is not immediatly marked as read and I have to scroll up and down, select other conversations and go back to the original one to make it read.

Expected results:

After clicking on the conversation, it should immediately appear as read.

The fact that this started happening in both, Telegram and Whatsapp makes me think that it's not the website's fault. In Chrome, it works flawlessly. I know that Whatsapp Web needs to roundtrip to the phone before the message is marked as read but at least in Telegram it should be instantanious.

I also have a suspicion that might have something to do with scroll listeners, as if the code thinks that the conversation is one pixel away from being scrolled all the way down but that's just a theory.

Comment 1

[Timea Cernea [:tbabos][inactive]]

Hi kirill.rakhman,

Can you please check if this is reproducible on the latest Nightly? Here is a link where you can find it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0a1/releasenotes/

It would be great if you could also create a new clean/profile and reproduce it using it. Sometimes extension and custom settings might be the cause of some issues, just making sure we are getting that factor out of the way.

I'm also on the way to create some accounts so I can chat with myself and see if this can be reproduced on my end too.

Looking forward to yout results!
Thanks

P.S: Guide for the new profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

Comment 2

[kirill.rakhman]

I was able to narrow the problem down to tab switching. I'm attaching two gifs where I switch to the Telegram tab in Chrome and in FF.

Comment 3

[kirill.rakhman]

Attachment: telegram_chrome.gif

Comment 4

[kirill.rakhman]

Attachment: telegram_ff.gif

Comment 5

[kirill.rakhman]

Btw, the FF gif is Nightly 67 with no extensions. You can see that even after scrolling around and switching the conversation, it takes longer to clear the unread icon.

Comment 6

[Timea Cernea [:tbabos][inactive]]

Thanks a lot for testing on Nightly without extensions. Couldn't find anything close to this so far but I trust that your narrowing is accurate and it has something to do with the tabs.
Moving it over to a component. Hopefully, someone has a better understanding of this.

Comment 7

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez [:emilio]]

This is not really actionable as is without investigating how conversations are marked as read and how are they detecting it. Probably related to how we dispatch some event or what not...

Seems like the source of this app is in https://github.com/zhukov/webogram. Looks like they're using the window focus and blur events to detect this. Maybe an issue could be filed there to verify this is not a bug on their end and to figure out what would need to get fixed on Firefox's side?

Comment 8

[kirill.rakhman]

I've opened https://github.com/zhukov/webogram/issues/1811, maybe the Telegram guys can chime in.

Comment 9

[Cameron McCormack (:heycam)]

Marking this P3 although I suspect this is in the wrong component.

Comment 10

[kirill.rakhman]

The development of the Telegram web app seems to be very stale these days. Any way to get some traction on the Firefox side? I have mild web dev experience and could assist with debugging if necessary.