1781081 - NewTabUtils.activityStreamLinks.getTopSites() does not include some favicons

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Max Waterman]

Attachment: slashdot_tile_with_placeholder.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a new profile (using firefox --ProfileManager or whatever)
2. Launch firefox
3. On the 'about:newtab' page, dismiss all the sponsored (and other) tiles.
4. Quit firefox
5. Examine the favicons.sqlite file to see what sites have stored favicons:eg
   sqlite3 /Users/davidmaxwaterman/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/favicons.sqlite 'select icon_url from moz_icons;'
6. Launch Firefox
7. Browse to 'https://slashdot.org/' - note favicon shown in tab
8. Note a 'placeholder' icon shown for slashdot on the newtab page.
9. Quit Firefox
10. Repeat step 5 - note no entry for slashdot
11. Revisit the about:newtab page some time later - note the favicon is displayed, and also has been added to the favicon.sqlite database.

I should add that I'm actually working on my own 'about:newtab' page and using the NewTabUtils.activityStreamLinks.getTopSites() API, and seeing the same behaviour.

Actual results:

A placeholder (in this case, a stylized 'S') is used even though the site has been visited and a favicon downloaded/displayed.

Expected results:

I would expect the favicon to be shown immediately for sites that the browser has shown favicons for.
The favicon is only shown some time later, with seemingly no reason for it.

Comment 1

[Max Waterman]

Attachment: slashdot_tile_with_favicon.png

favicon appears after a while

Comment 2

[Max Waterman]

Attachment: ff_troubleshooting_information.json

troubleshooting info

Comment 3

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::New Tab Page' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 4

[Max Waterman]

Attachment: Bug 1781081 - Load pending icons without setting beforePageShow to false. r=mossop

This is a problem I noticed specifically with slashdot. It seems that it
isn't standards compliant and has its favicon's link tag in the body.
As such, it causes a 'beforePageShow' to be set to false, even though
the page hasn't been shown. The 'beforePageShow' flag is assigned to
'canStoreIcon' in onStopRequest():263, resulting in it not being stored.
I don't think this it the original intention of these flags.

Comment 5

[Max Waterman]

Attachment: Bug 1781081 - Load pending icons without setting beforePageShow to false. r=mossop

This problem was noticed initially with slashdot. It seems that it
isn't standards compliant and has its favicon's link tag in the body.
As such, it causes a 'beforePageShow' to be set to false, even though
the page hasn't been shown. The 'beforePageShow' flag is assigned to
'canStoreIcon' in onStopRequest():263, resulting in it not being stored.
I don't think this it the original intention of these flags.

Comment 6

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:daleharvey, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 7

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

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, and this bug has priority 'P1'.
:amy, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 8

[Robin A. Meade]

I was having this problem with several pinned sites.
I just noticed that, if go to the site and bookmark it, it fixes the icon of the pinned site.

Comment 9

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

Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:thecount, since the bug has high priority, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.