1830475 - [Intermittent] In some cases, the Top Pick's favicon is displayed with a delay when first triggering it

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P3)

Description

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: delay.mp4

[Affected versions]:

• Nightly 114.0a1
• Beta 113.0b8
• Firefox 12.0.1

[Affected Platforms]:

• Mac 12.4
• Windows 10 x64
• Linux Mint 20

[Prerequisites]:

• Have a new profile with the following prefs set:
• browser.search.region to US
• browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.dataCollection.enabled to true
• browser.urlbar.merino.providers to adm,top_picks
• browser.urlbar.bestMatch.enabled to true

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the Nightly browser with the profile from the prerequisites.
2. Quickly type "asos" in the awesome bar.
3. Repeat Step 2 with different keywords, eg: udn, foodn, verywell, sfu
4. Observe the Top Pick's favicon.

[Expected result]:

• The Top Picks result is correctly displayed.

[Actual result]:

• The favicon of the Top Picks result is displayed with a delay if it was the first time triggered.

[Notes]:

• The issue is reproducible for the Top Picks that are showing for the first time. However, I am not sure if the issue is only reproducible with the keywords that with the first characters trigger a result and the full keyword trigger a different result. For example the "as" keyword triggers the "aus.edu" result and the "asos" keyword trigger "asos.com" result.
• Attached is a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I'll bump this down to an S3. It's a cosmetic problem, so by definition it could be an S4, but it's a core part of the feature. I don't think it's an S2 at this point.

The images are fetched from a CDN at the time the suggestions are displayed. We could pre-fetch images for the top N (i.e., most likely to be visited) domains, where N is like 10 or 100. We probably don't want to pre-fetch all 1,000. We could also maybe start fetching after the user types the first N chars of a recognized domain.