728240 - about:home is completely blank

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P1)

Description

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Attachment: Nightly (02/17)

about:home went on vacation

See video and log attached:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpin5JOfRxA&hd=1

--
Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.0.2)
Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:13.0a1) Gecko/13.0a1 Firefox/13.0a1

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Attachment: about:home (Nightly 02/17)

Comment 2

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

I am unable to reproduce this bug. Is there any steps to reproduce?

Comment 3

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Tap the Nightly icon.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

working for me too

Comment 5

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Installed Maple so I lost Nightly, reinstalled Nightly and about:home is back. Something during my Nightly install this morning got it into a state; all I did was adb install <path-to-apk>, and tapped Nightly to see this happen this morning exactly as you see it in the video. Although this is WFM, this looks pretty bad and might be worth an investigation?

Comment 6

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

If you start about:home from an intent, you will get a blank page.

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n org.mozilla.fennec/.App -d about:home

I thought it was the same as bug 724708 when I saw this myself.

Comment 7

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

Attachment: Patch

We are trying to process the intent before initializing in the startup path. Therefore about:home is not shown at times. This patch makes sure that the onNewIntent() is called at the end of initialize() and also that onNewIntent() is called in onResume() only if we have initialized.

This probably fixes the crash in bug 729219.

Comment 8

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 599325 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Brad has a better handle on this area of code

Comment 9

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Naoki Hirata :nhirata from comment #6)
> If you start about:home from an intent, you will get a blank page.
> 
> adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n org.mozilla.fennec/.App
> -d about:home

When would a user see this in the wild?

if it hurts when you poke yourself in the eye, typically its easier to stop poking yourself in the eye than to where safety goggles

Comment 10

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

s/where/wear/

Comment 11

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

is this a regression from bug 725932?

Comment 12

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 599325 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Let's look at other ways to avoid calling onNewIntent ourselves. This includes the onNewIntent called added by previous patches.

Comment 13

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

onNewIntent() is called when the activity is running and it gets a new intent from the system (like some other app/service sends an intent). We have all the logic to process the intent in onNewIntent(). I somehow feel it makes sense to call onNewIntent() on onResume() and at the end of initialization. This makes sure we process the received intent during startup.

Comment 14

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Doesn't Android already call onNewIntent for us?

Comment 15

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

I think we need a really good reason for calling it ourselves. Faster startup perf is a good reason, but we'd need to add some comments to the code so we don't break anything in the future, and we remember why we did it in the first place.

Comment 16

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

As per the documentation, this is called only when the activity is relaunched in the application stack. So the startup path wouldn't have onNewIntent() getting called. I can verify this though.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onNewIntent%28android.content.Intent%29

Comment 17

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

As per my logs, in startup path onNewIntent() is not called my android. It's only called when the application is running in the background and we open a link from another application.

However, everything seems to work fine in startup path without a call to onNewIntent() :D So we can safely remove it from code. Also, about:home cannot be called from outside sources.

Comment 18

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

Attachment: Patch

This removes the onNewIntent() call from onResume() as mentioned in previous comments.

Comment 19

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 599781 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Looks good and this is good cleanup too.

I assume you tested that about:home is no longer blank. I am interested as to why about:home can not be opened via an external intent. Why is about:home treated differently than about:addons for example?

Comment 20

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/f5a524a8a198

Comment 21

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f5a524a8a198

Comment 22

[Cristian Nicolae (:xti)]

Verified fixed on:

Firefox 13.0a1 (2012-02-28)
20120228031102
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/7ce4d9b55863

Firefox 12.0a2 (2012-02-27)
20120227042012
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/a08366de6833

Firefox 11 (2012-02-28)
20120228015008
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/6a6ec44b7b3c

--
Device: Samsung Galaxy S2
OS: Android 2.3.4

Comment 23

[Lucas Rocha (:lucasr)]

Calling platform callbacks directly (on*) is never a good idea guys. It's just plain misleading. At the very least the specific code that needs to be used in different places should be factored out into a separate non-callback-looking private method. This method would then be used where needed. Just saying...

Comment 24

[Sriram Ramasubramanian [:sriram]]

Lucas,
I agree with the idea, and this remove the on* callback :)