2030005 - Conversation starters no longer work / 429 excessive uncached or duplicate requests

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Machine Learning: Frontend, defect)

Description

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Attachment: Quickies.mp4

Found in

• Nightly 151.0a1 (2026-04-07)

Affected versions

• Nightly 151.0a1 (2026-04-07)

Affected platforms

• all

Steps to reproduce

1. Open Smart Window.
2. Reach IGN.com

Expected result

• Conversation starters should be displayed for the ign page.

Actual result

• The Conversation starters take a very long time to show up.
  Only the default unrelated conversation starters are displayed for all tabs.

These errors show up in console:
[ConversationSuggestions][sidebar-conversation-starters] failed: Error: Error: 429 status code (no body)

Regression range
N/A

Comment 1

[Tyler Etchart [:tetchart]]

Platform side is having 429's from vertex on the Qwen model causing multiple retries and eventual fallback for conversation starters.

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

slackbot summary

• A single page navigation was triggering 3 conversation starter requests instead of one. Each failed request then retried twice (default max retries = 2 in the OpenAI client), resulting in up to 9 total requests for a single conversation starter attempt.
• The duplicate requests appear to stem from multiple triggers for the same tab:
  • On first sidebar open: both openSidebar -> onCreateNewChatClick and firstUpdated fire, causing a double request.
  • On tab switch: both tabSelect -> openSidebar and onLocationChange can fire.
  • On navigation with redirects (e.g., / to /home): onLocationChange fires for each redirect step, triggering requests before the final page title is available.
• Suspected bug in the onLocationChange handler triggering loadStarterPrompts more than once for the same tab.
• Short-term fix proposed: have loadStarterPrompts (which is now tab-aware) return early if it receives multiple requests for the same tab.
• Longer-term fix: investigate and prevent loadStarterPrompts from being invoked more than once per tab navigation.

Comment 3

[:omarg]

Attachment: Bug 2030005 - fix starter prompts to dedup requests and stop re-generating on tab switch r=#ai-frontend-reviewers

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/0429b619fbaa
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/6402f18e2363
fix starter prompts to dedup requests and stop re-generating on tab switch r=ai-frontend-reviewers,flozia

Comment 5

[amarc]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/6402f18e2363

Comment 6

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

The patch landed in nightly and beta is affected.
:omarg, is this bug important enough to require an uplift?

• If yes, please nominate the patch for beta approval.
  • See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Requesting_an_Uplift for documentation on how to request an uplift.
• If no, please set status-firefox151 to wontfix.

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 7

[:omarg]

Attachment: Bug 2030005 - fix starter prompts to dedup requests and stop re-generating on tab switch

Original Revision: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D296898

Comment 8

[Phabricator Automation]

firefox-beta Uplift Approval Request

• User impact if declined/Reason for urgency: Conversation starters stop working from budget exhaustion due to more conversation starter requests going to the LLM than is necessary.
• Code covered by automated testing?: yes
• Fix verified in Nightly?: yes
• Needs manual QE testing?: yes
• Steps to reproduce for manual QE testing: - Open Smart Window
• Open Network tab in Browser Tools
• Navigate to a website
• One request for starters should be logged for /completion end point
• Open a second tab
• Switching away from tab with starters, and back, should not trigger new request to conversation starters as it should now re-use the already generated starter prompts
• Risk associated with taking this patch: medium
• Explanation of risk level: Medium risk to starter prompt being generated for empty conversations, production code on loading/caching starter prompts was updating to prevent unnecessary requests from being sent to the LLM backend.
• String changes made/needed?: none
• Is Android affected?: no

Comment 9

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Verified as fixed in our latest Nightly 152.0a1 (2026-05-04)

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/d4b5bda02bdd
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/80740978653f

Comment 11

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Verified as fixed in our latest Beta 151.0b7