1694629 - The "click" ping is not registered if the Sponsored Top Site tiles are open using middle click or the context menu options

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Top Sites, defect)

Description

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: click ping not registered for middle click or context menu options.gif

[Affected versions]:

• Firefox Nightly 88.0a1 (Build ID:20210223230332);

[Affected Platforms]:

• Windows 10 x64;
• macOS 10.15.7;
• Linux Mint 20 x64;

[Prerequisites]:

• Have the latest Firefox Nightly installed.
• Have the following prefs set:
  • browser.topsites.useRemoteSetting set to true
  • browser.topsites.experiment.ebay-2020-1 set to true
  • browser.ping-centre.log set to true
• Have any of the following regions set: (US, CA, GB, DE, FR or AU).
• Have the browser console opened.

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the Nightly browser with the profile from prerequisites.
2. Open a new tab and click the Amazon Sponsored tile.
3. Observe the browser console.
4. Navigate to about:telemetry#keyed-scalars-tab and search for the contextual.services.topsites.click keyed scalar.
5. Observe the "newtab_1" value.

[Expected result]:
Step 3: The click ping is registered for the Amazon Sponsored tile.
Step 5: The value of the "newtab_1" is increased by 1.

[Actual result]:
Step 3: The click ping is NOT registered for the Amazon Sponsored tile.
Step 5: The value of the "newtab_1" is NOT increased by 1.

[Notes]:

• The issue is reproducible for both Amazon and eBay Sponsored tiles.
• The issue is reproducible using the following scenarios:
  • Opening the tiles using middle click.
  • Opening the tiles using the tile's context menu option (Open in New Tab).
  • Opening the tiles using the Firefox context menu options (Open in New Tab, Open in New Container tab and Open in New Window)
• Attached a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

This is not specific to the sponsored TopSites, rather, pretty much all the clickables on the newtab page will not record the click event for the middle-click. IIRC, this is the trade-off between accuracy and implementation complexity, specifically, we believe that the middle clicks are much less frequent than the regular clicks. Hence, we decided to not add the middle-click handlers to the newtab clickables in general in order to simplify the telemetry implementation.