1899562 - Do not include the weather widget for about:home startup cache

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, enhancement)

Description

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

The weather widget should not be cached in the startup cache as it could show out-of-date weather info on the homepage.

Comment 1

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

This might be a helpful pattern for fixing this: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D174646

Comment 2

[Reem Hamoui]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1899562 - Remove weather widget from startup cache.

Comment 3

[Reem Hamoui]

Attachment: Bug 1899562 - Remove weather widget from startup cache. r=#home-newtab-reviewers

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ece25e71d623
Remove weather widget from startup cache. r=home-newtab-reviewers,thecount

Comment 5

[Reem Hamoui]

We've been working on removing the weather widget from cache, but found the process to have more complexity than anticipated. Upon removing it from cache, we've noticed that other parts of the new tab page were also being affected by not "rehydrating" after initial load, specifically the sponsored topsites content, making them not load on a fresh cache.

To address this, we've opted to only remove the isStartup variable from the weather dispatch call to the Redux store. Previously, this variable allowed to handle weather updates differently during startup. By removing it however, the fetch function no longer differentiates whether the weather data is being loaded as part of a startup process. This change means the weather feed loads without any startup-specific behavior.

Now, when cache loads, sponsored topsites content will load as expected. However, the weather widget will flicker with new data after showing cached data for a brief period. We've landed this patch for now as it solves the problem of showing old cached weather data on startup.

We're currently working around for a fix for this, but seems that we are on the right path and will work on landing a fix soon

cc: :thecount

Comment 6

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ece25e71d623