705958 - [Page Thumbnails] Use only the top 25% of a web page

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

The ability for Firefox to create partial thumbnails has potential benefits in features such as New Tab Page.  Currently, thumbnails are generated by taking a snapshot of a page's full width and showing a portion of the page's height.  This produces thumbnails that look like small versions of the full pages themselves.

However, showing only the top left portion of the page may make thumbnails more recognizable overall.  Attached are thumbnails as they are being displayed now in New Tab Page (left column), how they could look taking 2/3 of the page width (middle column), and how they could look with 1/3 of the page width (right column).  Before adding partial thumbnails to any feature, we should test how page recognizability is effected by cutting off some of the page width.  For instance, some pages with strong branding in the upper left may be more easy to recognize, while others with more unusual orientations may be harder to recognize (such as Wikipedia).

I'm marking this as an enhancement for now - it would be great to try this out, perhaps with Test Pilot or Mechanical Turk - but it should not block New Tab as a feature from landing.

Comment 1

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Attachment: patch v1

Uses only the top 25% of a page to take a screenshot from.

Comment 2

[matthias koplenig [:metasieben]]

ttaubert this looks really nice.

maybe increasing the crop to 40-50% would help with edge-cases(eg. centered sites).

Comment 3

[Chris Lee [:clee]]

I'm playing with this today and depending on the site it does look a bit strange.  

Sites that are left-aligned will probably look fine.  

Tim, are there any known issues for thumbnails today?  Out of 9 boxes, I see 3 thumbnails showing up.

Comment 4

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Chris Lee [:clee] from comment #3)
> I'm playing with this today and depending on the site it does look a bit
> strange.  

Yes, 25% doesn't seem ideal. I've already talked to Limi how to make this better and from a first quick look 50% seems to cover a better portion of the depicted web site - though we actually need some more data and usage experience for this.

> Sites that are left-aligned will probably look fine.  

Yes, I too have many centered sites that look just ugly, tbh. We could try detecting the X offset of a page and adjust the crop rect. Not sure though how easy that is.

As this is a follow-up bug and currently blocks bug 716538, I'm not sure it should. I think we can live with whole-page thumbnails (that's the way Chrome does it, too). IMHO this shouldn't block getting Nightly tester feedback and we should have rather 'safe thumbnails' for a first testing experience... what do you think?

> Tim, are there any known issues for thumbnails today?  Out of 9 boxes, I see
> 3 thumbnails showing up.

I have no issues with thumbnails not being rendered... Are these maybe redirecting sites? That would be another bug :)

Comment 5

[Chris Lee [:clee]]

> I have no issues with thumbnails not being rendered... Are these maybe
> redirecting sites? That would be another bug :)

Some of redirects, but others are not.  I have Facebook login, ldap phonebook, Google docs, etc.  Any idea why this isn't loading?  I can file a separate bug if there isn't one already.

Comment 6

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Attachment: patch v2

Testing top 50%.

Comment 7

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Chris Lee [:clee] from comment #5)
> Some of redirects, but others are not.  I have Facebook login, ldap
> phonebook, Google docs, etc.  Any idea why this isn't loading?  I can file a
> separate bug if there isn't one already.

You can file one if you want, I have no idea (yet) why they're not loading (except for the redirects).

Comment 8

[Chris Lee [:clee]]

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] from comment #6)
> Created attachment 589177 [details] [diff] [review]
> patch v2
> 
> Testing top 50%.

Has this patch been landed on UX branch?  I'm still seeing top right 25% of the page in my thumbnails?

Comment 9

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Do we still want this or can we close it?

Comment 10

[Chris Lee [:clee]]

I think we can close this.

Comment 11

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Ok, thank you, closing.

Comment 12

[Chris Lee (:cleer)]

(In reply to Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (Firefox UX) from comment #0)
> The ability for Firefox to create partial thumbnails has potential benefits
> in features such as New Tab Page.  Currently, thumbnails are generated by
> taking a snapshot of a page's full width and showing a portion of the page's
> height.  This produces thumbnails that look like small versions of the full
> pages themselves.
> 
> However, showing only the top left portion of the page may make thumbnails
> more recognizable overall.  Attached are thumbnails as they are being
> displayed now in New Tab Page (left column), how they could look taking 2/3
> of the page width (middle column), and how they could look with 1/3 of the
> page width (right column).  Before adding partial thumbnails to any feature,
> we should test how page recognizability is effected by cutting off some of
> the page width.  For instance, some pages with strong branding in the upper
> left may be more easy to recognize, while others with more unusual
> orientations may be harder to recognize (such as Wikipedia).
> 
> I'm marking this as an enhancement for now - it would be great to try this
> out, perhaps with Test Pilot or Mechanical Turk - but it should not block
> New Tab as a feature from landing.

Comment 13

[Chris Lee (:cleer)]

^ Sorry, Bugzilla misclick.