1568809 - [Intermittent] The "New Tab" page elements are partially loaded or are not loaded at all if the page is refreshed for ~3 times

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P2)

Description

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: rec of the issue.gif

[Affected versions]:

• Firefox Release 68.0.1 - Build ID: 20190717172542
• Firefox Beta 69.0b7 - Build ID: 20190722201635

[Affected Platforms]:

• All Windows
• All Linux
• All Mac

[Prerequisites]:

• Have a new Firefox profile with the "browser.search.region" pref set to "US" in the "about:config" page

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the browser with the profile from prerequisites and open a New Tab.
2. Quickly refresh the page three times.
3. Observe the behavior.

[Expected result]:

• The New Tab page elements are correctly displayed and rendered.

[Actual result]:

• The New Tab elements are partially loaded or are not loaded at all.

[Notes]:

• This issue is not reproducible on the latest Firefox Nightly 70.0a1.
• This issue seems to be intermittent considering the fact that I have managed to reproduce it just once from three attempts.
• Attached a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Investigate what's involved with this and maybe how long it's been happening.

Comment 2

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

So I was able to reproduce this in both AS and DS in beta.

It looked to me like there was a flash of about:blank before newtab loaded, which if you can refresh between it loading about:blank and another newtab being injected, you get this experience.

Looks like it is related to the pref browser.tabs.remote.separatePrivilegedContentProcess which is different in nightly and beta/release

Thoughts? Is this known or possibly critical? Feels like an edge case to me.

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

We've recently turned off the separate privileged content process on Nightly in bug 1574169, so presuming this isn't something that can still be reproduced on Nightly, we should probably downgrade the priority of this, and have it block bug 1513045.

Comment 4

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Having talked with some DOM folks, we believe this might be fixed with recent DocumentChannel changes.

mcoman, if you set browser.tabs.remote.separatePrivilegedContentProcess to true and restart the browser, are you still able to reproduce on Nightly?

Comment 5

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

Hi Mike, I have tested this issue using the steps that you provided it in the previous comment and I have not managed to reproduce it anymore.

Tested using the latest Firefox Nightly (75.0a1 Build ID: 20200223214228) installed on Windows 10 x64, Mac 10.15.2, and Ubuntu 18.04 x64.

Comment 6

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Thanks!