2023464 - "Report" dialog appears automatically on every new-tab, after user starts to report a new-tab-tile and then dismisses the dialog with Esc key

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:

1. Open several tabs (e.g. example.org and a new tab)
2. In your new-tab page, click an ad or news-tile's 3-dot-menu and choose "Report".
   --> This brings up an in-content "report" modal dialog on the new-tab page.
3. Press Esc on your keyboard.
   --> This dismisses the "report" dialog.
4. Open several more new-tabs (e.g. Ctrl+T several times)

ACTUAL RESULTS:
The first new-tab that you open looks fine (maybe because it's preloaded?). After that, every additional one has the "report" dialog up (which is a modal dialog that prevents you from interacting with the rest of the new-tab page). This persists even if you press "Esc" to dismiss these dialogs. The only way to make them stop is to explicitly click "Cancel".

EXPECTED RESULTS:
No report dialog in freshly-opened new-tabs, because:

• that dialog should be tied to the specific tab where I initiated the "report" action.
• I already dismissed the report dialog on that tab where I had initiated it (in step 3)

I'm using Firefox Nightly 150.0a1 (2026-03-13) (64-bit) on Ubuntu 24.04

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

BTW, this happens even if I skip step 3 (i.e. if I don't hit Esc ever). It's slightly less surprising in that scenario, but still feels surprising/broken, since as I noted in the expected-results, it feels like the "report" dialog should only ever show up in the specific tab(s) where I explicitly summon it by reporting a tile.

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screencast of bug

Here's a screencast of the bug.

Notable timestamps
4s-6s: I report a new-tab tile.
6s: The "Report" dialog appears.
8s: I press "Esc" to dismiss the dialog.
10s: I open a new-tab and it looks fine. [but wait...]
11s: I open another new-tab, and it inexplicably has a "Report" dialog open. [This is the bug]
13s: I open a bunch more new-tabs. They've all got "Report" dialogs open. [This is the bug]
15s: I press "Esc" on the latest new-tab to dismiss its "Report" dialog.
17s: I open a new-tab and it's still got a "Report" dialog open despite what I just did [This is the bug]
23s: I explicitly click "Cancel" on one of the dialogs.
26s: I open a new tab and it's still got a report dialog up (maybe because it was preloaded)
27s: I open another new tab and there's no report dialog up.

(To reiterate comment 1... In this screencast, I'm pressing "Esc" to dismiss the dialog in the new-tab where I brought it up, and that makes it all-the-more-surprising when the dialog comes back. But this still feels like a bug even if I skip that part and leave the dialog up in the first new-tab. Other modal content -- e.g. the pencil "Customize" menu and the shortcut "Edit" menu -- does not have this problem.)

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I can reproduce this bug in Nightly 2025-08-29, the first Nightly where this report UI was enabled (just for ads at that point), via bug 1985594.

(I didn't bother testing in older builds with the pref manually enabled.)

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #3)

(I didn't bother testing in older builds with the pref manually enabled.)

OK, I did that^ now -- bisecting with browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.reportContent.enabled:true and browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.discoverystream.reportAds.enabled:true.

Regression range: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/pushloghtml?fromchange=5bb6f98466b7a3e8d2f92e0c3ab4c18bd969b826&tochange=80e53238ba81917e9b85d7511c55021ebf8407bf

Before that range, the dialog is only ever shown on the tab where I summoned it, as you'd expect.
After that range, the dialog unexpectedly appears on unrelated new-tabs, when you open several additional new tabs, as shown in the attached screencast.

--> This was a regression from bug 1954656. (That's interesting since bug 1954656 was ostensibly just about adding telemetry; but it apparently changed our actual user-facing behavior as well, probably by accident.)

Reem, maybe you could you take a look?

Comment 5

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

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1954656