1745495 - ActivityStream is still loaded when browser.newtabpage.enabled is set to false

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

When browser.newtabpage.enabled is set to false I still see AboutNewTab create and initialize ActivityStream.

Comment 1

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

Attachment: Bug 1745495 - Don't initialize activity stream when new tab is disabled. r=daleharvey

This will also load activity stream if the pref is enabled again.

Comment 2

[Amy Churchwell [:amy]]

Hi, thanks for the patch. Would you be able to provide steps to test? Not sure how to verify if this is working or not.

Comment 3

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

Unfortunately, there's not a great way to test without some manual logging.

1. Add a dump to ActivityStream constructor
2. Start with newtab disabled ./mach run --setpref browser.newtabpage.enabled=false
3. Verify dump isn't logged.

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/df6f22573bb0
Don't initialize activity stream when new tab is disabled. r=daleharvey

Comment 5

[Iulian Moraru]

Backed out for causing multiple leaks.
From what I can see now, the only platform affected is OS X 10.15 WebRender debug

Push with failures

Failure log for wp
Failure log wr1
Failure log wr2
Failure log wr3
Failure log wr4

Backout link

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The wpt tests run with activity stream disabled, so I suspect something is not getting cleaned up properly with activity stream disabled. I don't see anything obvious at a quick glance, will look again later if I get time.

Comment 7

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

There's a r+ patch which didn't land and no activity in this bug for 2 weeks.
:bdahl, could you have a look please?
For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 8

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

I'm going to put this on hold while I work on some other higher priority stuff.

Notes:
I was able to reproduce this locally on MacOS with a debug artifact build. The leak seems to come from NOT initializing the bookmark service. When I add the following to AboutNewTab.jsm:

+XPCOMUtils.defineLazyServiceGetter(
+  this,
+  "bmsvc",
+  "@mozilla.org/browser/nav-bookmarks-service;1",
+  "nsINavBookmarksService"
+);
+
dump(">>> bmsvc " + bmsvc.tagsFolder + "\n");

The leak no longer happens. I tried to do some debugging with the bookmarks service C++ code, but the leak does not reproduce when I do my own local debug builds.