2010964 - Blank New Tab page when running a study

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

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Attachment: profile.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:147.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/147.0

Steps to reproduce:

Ran Firefox 147 on Fedora (GNOME, Wayland) with “Firefox Home” selected for New Tab after updating from 146. (I have Firefox installed using RPM, not Flatpak)

Used Firefox normally for a few hours (not sure if the effect was immediate).

Opened a new tab, it was completely blank (dark gray theme background color, bookmark bar not visible at the top).

Opened about:studies and removed a study (likely “New Tab 148.0.20251211.63751 to Release•Complete” but not sure).

Opened a new tab / about:newtab again, it started working again.

Actual results:

After some time, about:newtab / Firefox Home became a blank gray page.

A clean profile worked normally, the new tab was populated with the search widget, logo, wallpaper etc.

Refresh Firefox from about:support fixed the issue only temporarily; the issue returned after a few hours.

Removing the suspected New Tab rollout study in about:studies made about:newtab start working immediately again.

Expected results:

about:newtab / Firefox Home should consistently render the normal New Tab page (search/top sites/highlights etc.) and should not become blank/gray over time.

Participation in a New Tab rollout/study should not be able to break New Tab rendering for a profile.

Comment 1

[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.