791098 - deprecate getThumbnail on Tab class for Fennec and E10S support

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

This sync method just uses canvas overly complex way to produce the screenshot.  This method doesn't work on Fennec.  If a page-mod was used instead then that would work, but it would mean the method would have to be async.  So I suggest that we deprecate the getThumbnail method of the Tab class and create a thumbnail module instead which would be async, and thus work on Fennec.

Comment 2

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

this is required for e10s. we should deprecate/implement this ASAP so that addon devs have time to migrate.

Jordan, will you have time to work on this soon(-ish)?

Comment 3

[Jordan Santell [:jsantell] [@jsantell]]

I don't have the bandwidth for this at the moment, but is a pretty straight forward fix I think. When working on it before, I had problems rendering it, using the underlying thumbnail method which didn't produce correct results on Fennec, I believe.

Comment 4

[Erik Vold [:erikvold] (please needinfo? me)]

At the moment we have `console.error('This method is not supported with E10S');` (when used in e10s mode) which I think is good enough for now, if we wish to remove it sooner we should add a message which is always run, also there is a separate error message if this api is used on fennec, so I think we have added the deprecation warnings in the necessary places.

We should wait awhile and remove this method a couple releases after e10s rides the trains.

Comment 6

[:shell escalante]

luca checking - thinks already deprecated

Comment 7

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

This feature currently logs an error both Firefox Desktop with e10s enabled and Fennec (as described in Comment 4) and returns a blank image:
- https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/56b3f2c6f53e72698fea6c25130efceef2a26548/addon-sdk/source/lib/sdk/tabs/tab-firefox.js#185
- https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/56b3f2c6f53e72698fea6c25130efceef2a26548/addon-sdk/source/lib/sdk/tabs/tab-fennec.js#80

The error message on Fennec is 'This method is not yet supported by Fennec', which is probably a bit misleading, because it is more likely to be supported from the new WebExtensions API than by this SDK API module.

Comment 8

[:shell escalante]

issue is still valid - but situation should not change for how handled at this time.  There isn't a better way - beyond moving capability to webextensions - which is coming

Comment 9

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399562