1798712 - The loading page animation was shown when starting Firefox 108.0a1 20221102094537 even though Homepage and new windows, and new tabs were set to blank page

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect, P3)

Description

[Matt Fagnani]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:108.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/108.0

Steps to reproduce:

I started Firefox Nightly 108.0a1 20221102094537 on Wayland with WebRender compositing in Plasma 5.26.2 in a Fedora 37 KDE Plasma installation. I had previously set Homepage and new windows, and New tabs to Blank page in about:preferences#home in my profile.

Actual results:

The loading page animation in which a blue dot moved horizontally back and forth with horizontal lines in the New Tab in the tab bar was shown when starting Firefox Nightly 108.0a1 20221102094537 even though Home page and new windows, and new tabs were set to blank page. The loading page animation wasn't shown in this way when starting Firefox Nightly 108.0a1 2022-11-01 and earlier with the same profile. I ran mozregression --good 2022-11-1 --bad 2022-11-2 -p ~/.mozilla/firefox/z8d4nvrc.default-nightly --profile-persistence reuse --persist /tmp/mozregression

The bisection ended with three changes for Bug 1676492 in the pushlog.

2e7abedae4a01ba3fefaa93462b5211824e5c947 Neil Deakin — Bug 1676492, when new tab page is configured to show a blank page, it should not be added to session history, r=Mardak
1ef480e93a6ac539b541deb30fc7e752fcaa8cc3 Neil Deakin — Bug 1676492, show the bookmarks toolbar when a new window is opened when the preference is set to show a blank page, r=Mardak,settings-reviewers
0e738eb84828a78181d412a699af481f8f02ea51 Neil Deakin — Bug 1676492, create a special blank tab page that will show the bookmarks toolbar when 'Only Show on New Tab' is used' even when the new tab page is disabled, r=Gijs,Mardak

3:37.98 INFO: Narrowed integration regression window from [d6b82b3d, 6654b5c9] (3 builds) to [d6b82b3d, 2e7abeda] (2 builds) (~1 steps left)
3:37.98 INFO: No more integration revisions, bisection finished.
3:37.98 INFO: Last good revision: d6b82b3d655959b256be143218b86ee28d9fe06a
3:37.98 INFO: First bad revision: 2e7abedae4a01ba3fefaa93462b5211824e5c947
3:37.98 INFO: Pushlog:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=d6b82b3d655959b256be143218b86ee28d9fe06a&tochange=2e7abedae4a01ba3fefaa93462b5211824e5c947

Expected results:

The loading page animation shouldn't be shown when starting Firefox if Home page and new windows, and new tabs were set to blank page.

Comment 1

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

:enndeakin, since you are the author of the regressor, bug 1676492, could you take a look? Also, could you set the severity field?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 2

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

We tried to reproduce this issue on a Ubuntu 18 but we dont see the loading animation with either restart or restore session.
We also tried to use a VM with Fedora 36 and we couldnt reproduce this issue there either.
Unfortunately we dont have the Fedora KDE 37 to try and reproduce this issue on our end. Adding the Qa not actionable tag for now.

Comment 3

[Matt Fagnani]

Attachment: Firefox 109.0a1 (2022-11-17) loading page animation with blank startup/home page

I'm attaching a recording of Firefox 109.0a1 (2022-11-17) on Wayland in Plasma 5.26.3 in Fedora 37 showing the loading page animation of the blue dot moving back and forth horizontally to the left of the New Tab in the tab bar with a blank startup/home page. My profile has both Homepage and new windows and New tabs set to Blank Page in about:preferences#home. This issue happened with Firefox 109.0a1 (2022-11-17) on Wayland and XWayland in Plasma 5.26.3 and GNOME 43.1 on Wayland in Fedora 37. I doubt that the distribution version would matter for a graphical issue like this. I made a new profile and just set both Homepage and new windows and New tabs set to Blank Page in about:preferences#home. The loading page animation showed for a shorter time (< 1 second) than with my usual profile (about 1 second), so it's possible that with a new profile this animation wouldn't be easily seen especially if the system used is relatively fast compared to mine so that Firefox started quicker.

Comment 4

[Matt Fagnani]

Each time the loading page animation stopped, the text New Tab moved to its left so that it overlapped the area where the blue dot was. The shifting of New Tab to the left might be easier to see than the blue dot if Firefox started more quickly than on my system. Thanks.