1687135 - Incorrect favicons for Top Sites

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Richard Barnes [:rbarnes]]

Attachment: Screenshot on 2021-01-16 at 22:01:56.png

Expected behavior: The Top Sites section of the new tab page shows the favicon corresponding to each entry.

Actual behavior: Some sites' favicons are replaced by favicons from other sites. In my profile, the favicons from theverge.com and news.ycombinator.com seem to be applied most commonly to incorrect sites. In the attached image, the favicon from theverge.com has been incorrectly applied to mail.google.com and wapo.com.

Comment 1

[Petruta Horea [:phorea], Desktop QA]

This works fine for me using Nightly 86.0a1 2021-01-16 and latest Nightly 87.0a1 with browser.topsites.useRemoteSetting pref set to True or False.

Is it still reproducible on latest Nightly version? Also, could you please go to about:studies and check if there is anything noted there?
Thank you!

Comment 2

[Richard Barnes [:rbarnes]]

Confirmed, problem persists in latest Nightly (87.0a1 (2021-02-10)), with either value for browser.topsites.useRemoteSetting.

I have not experimented with a clean profile, given the time / effort it would take to build up top sites there.

In about:studies, there are several "Completed Studies", and the only "Active" one is "HTTP3 on Nightly".

Comment 3

[Petruta Horea [:phorea], Desktop QA]

Hi Dao,
We would appreciate any ideas that could help us in further debugging this.
Thank you!

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Nan, do you have any ideas? Looks like the tippy top service is failing us?

Comment 5

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

Off-hand, I don't think TippyTop service was the cause here. Since neither "mail.google" nor "wapo" is included in the TippyTop manifest, it's very unlikely that TippyTop will associate icons to any of these two sides.

I suspect that the issue was caused by the incorrect icon links in the Places favicon database.

See here for more details about how TopSitesFeed finds favicons for the sites.

:rbarnes - is it possible to run the debugger through the above function with your profile to see what's going on there?

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Hey Dão, is this still actionable, and if so, is it really still S2?

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Gonna reset the severity and priority and move this to Places based on comment 5.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

We addressed most issues with wrong favicons being assigned a couple years ago in Bug 1533480 and its dependencies.
This bug is later, so it looks like there may still be some race condition doing that, but I'm not sure what it may be. It may have been useful to run some queries at the time, now it may be a bit late to get useful debug info.
My only thought is that being the wrong pages things that may have redirected to The Verge, I wonder if the problem is indeed related to redirects.

I'll resolve the bug as incomplete because I doubt we can get debug info after 1 year, thus it's not really actionable. But, if the problem still exists please reopen the bug, and I'll post some code snippets to try understanding what's up.