1548648 - Preloaded about:newtab sends a session ping when the window closes

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P1)

Description

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

I would think this has always been happening, so I'm not sure if we should prevent it or we already somehow filter these out from our analysis. I happened to print this out this data ping data when testing something else when closing the window:

{
	addon_version: "20190501155723",
	locale: "en-US",
	user_prefs: 255,
	session_id: "{7367e412-c7cd-6741-a0b9-907ffc332542}",
	page: "about:newtab",
	session_duration: (void 0),
	action: "activity_stream_session",
	perf: {
		load_trigger_type: "unexpected",
		is_preloaded: true,
		is_prerendered: false,
		topsites_icon_stats: {
			custom_screenshot: 0,
			screenshot_with_icon: 0,
			screenshot: 0,
			tippytop: 6,
			rich_icon: 0,
			no_image: 0
		},
		topsites_pinned: 0,
		topsites_search_shortcuts: 1,
		topsites_first_painted_ts: 1556822523493
	}
}

Comment 1

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

That one I printed was the raw data going into createPing. Here's the output when turning on ping centre logging:

{
  "locale": "en-US",
  "topic": "activity-stream",
  "client_id": "29ff4a1c-f329-7c42-8e90-3ea3062f4f1a",
  "version": "68.0a1",
  "release_channel": "default",
  "addon_version": "20190501155723",
  "user_prefs": 255,
  "session_id": "{d2c600f7-da82-7645-8d93-a1124ed5703a}",
  "page": "about:newtab",
  "action": "activity_stream_session",
  "perf": {
    "load_trigger_type": "unexpected",
    "is_preloaded": true,
    "is_prerendered": false,
    "topsites_icon_stats": {
      "custom_screenshot": 0,
      "screenshot_with_icon": 0,
      "screenshot": 0,
      "tippytop": 6,
      "rich_icon": 0,
      "no_image": 0
    },
    "topsites_pinned": 0,
    "topsites_search_shortcuts": 1,
    "topsites_first_painted_ts": 1556826993376
  },
  "profile_creation_date": 18018,
  "region": "CA"
}

Comment 2

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/4977

Comment 3

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

Mardak - Nice catch!

I think it's a bug based on how we define the "user session". A hidden preloaded newtab is a pre-session, but not an actual user session until it's shown. This contributes to part of bug 1434680 since the ETL job sets the session_duration to "-1" if it's missing. However, it has little impact on the key telemetry collection since we don't use the total number of sessions for data analysis.

Comment 4

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/5c4931404035

Comment 5

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

I have verified that this issue is no longer reproducible with the latest Firefox Nightly (68.0a1 Build ID - 20190506214617) installed, on Windows 10 x64, Arch Linux and Mac 10.13.3. Now, a telemetry ping similar to the one from comment 1 is sent after the tab is closed.