1892461 - The selected wallpaper is applied to the New Tab page even if the onboarding spotlight is dismissed

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Messaging System, defect, P3)

Description

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: rec of the issue.gif

[Affected versions]:

• Firefox Beta 126.0b2 - Build ID: 20240417091940
• Firefox Nightly 127.0a1 - Build ID: 20240418214121

[Affected Platforms]:

• Windows 11 x64
• macOS 14.1
• Ubuntu 22.04 x64

[Prerequisites]:

• Have the following prefs in the "about:config" page:
  • browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.devtoolsEnabled set to true
  • browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.newtabWallpapers.enabled set to true

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the browser using the profile from the prerequisites.
2. Navigate to "about:asrouter" and paste sample JSON into a text field.
3. Click the "Modify" button displayed near the text field from step 2.
4. Click any wallpaper card and dismiss the spotlight by clicking the "X" button.
5. Open a new tab page and observe the background.

[Expected result]:

• The wallpaper selected in step 4 was not applied to the New Tab page background.

[Actual result]:

• The wallpaper selected in step 4 was applied to the New Tab page background.

[Additional Notes]:

• This issue is reproducible if the spotlight is dismissed using the "Esc" key instead of clicking of the "X" button.
• Attached a screen recording of the issue.

Comment 1

[Punam Dahiya [:pdahiya]]

It's possible this is expected behavior , NI @emcminn to help confirm hit of theme icons save theme for users.

@Amy will be good to check if spotlight experiment will be targeting users with wallpaper pre-installed

Comment 2

[Amy Churchwell [:amy]]

(In reply to Punam Dahiya [:pdahiya] from comment #1)

@Amy will be good to check if spotlight experiment will be targeting users with wallpaper pre-installed

We can assume that no user will have a wallpaper pre-installed because this experiment introduces the feature.

Comment 3

[Emily McMinn :emcminn]

I've checked this out with the Themes component, and I can confirm that this is the behaviour there as well. I suspect it never came up because within about:welcome where the themes component was used, there's no esc behaviour or dismiss button - the only way to navigate forward is to click "not now", which has theme: automatic included in the action to reset the theme.

There is an option in code to toggle this; setting "persistActiveTheme": true on the tiles action will set the initial theme, so that we can revert to it on navigation. I believe this is what was used for the upgrade spotlight when themes were included there.

     // If the action has persistActiveTheme: true, we set the initial theme to the currently active theme
    // so that it can be reverted to in the event that the user navigates away from the screen
    if (action.persistActiveTheme) {
      this.props.setInitialTheme(this.props.activeTheme);
    }

Usage like this:

"tiles": {
          "type": "theme",
          "action": {
            "theme": "<event>",
            "persistActiveTheme": true
          },
....

I don't know if this can be leveraged to work for wallpapers as well; at first glance it seems like the implementation will need to be a little different since we are setting wallpapers with a pref and not enabling/disabling an addon.