1628025 - The connection between the Top Sites and the New Tab page is unclear when the New Tab page is not used

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[C. Martin]

Attachment: ff_address_bar_just_clicked.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

Steps to reproduce:

When I click the new address bar of FF 75 I get a list with five items I can identify as being completely outdated. They are neither in my bookmarks, nor in my history. I can identify them as being at least 5 years old.
I've tried clearing all history, deleted all bookmarks (after searching them of course), started in safe mode - no change. There is no way to remove them by clicking or pressing del.
Then I even reset my Firefox profile. The 5 items were gone until sync restored my profile. So I guess these 5 items are somehow stored in my sync profile but there is no way to get rid of them. Maybe they are in some location the current bookmark manager doesn't show/have access to? I've never seen these items pop up before FF 75 - and now they show up whenever I click the address bar - that's why I'm posting this as a bug.
I know this is vague and I'll gladly try to provide more information if you can tell me how and what.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to C. Martin from comment #0)

When I click the new address bar of FF 75 I get a list with five items I can identify as being completely outdated. They are neither in my bookmarks, nor in my history. I can identify them as being at least 5 years old.

That list comes from the NewTab page, you can check the list on about:NewTab and customize it to your likes, or disable Top Sites and then we'll revert to the old list. It sounds like you might have pinned some pages there, and then set your new tab page to something else.

I'll keep this open to evaluate whether we want to do something when the user is not using the new tab page, and then the connection between it and urlbar results won't be evident.

Comment 2

[C. Martin]

Thank you Marco, you were right. Those apparently were my most visited sites 5 years ago - then I disabled the Firefox page altogether but FF 75 still found them.
It might be helpful to add a tooltip or something alike to show the source of a displayed list item.

Comment 3

[Kestrel]

(In reply to C. Martin from comment #2)

It might be helpful to add a tooltip or something alike to show the source of a displayed list item.

That's Bug 1608418.

Comment 4

[Kestrel]

Sorry, didn't mean to change Status flag.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We are evaluating how to handle this problem, we may disable Top Sites if the New Tab page is not being used.
We are also evaluating long term solutions to allow customizing the list without having to use the New Tab page.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Top Sites have been disconnected from the new tab page pref, and pinned sites got a badge. The missing part here is allowing to edit them directly from the urlbar, that will likely come in the near future.