946896 - The about:newtab thumbnails stop showing up when you move your profile to another machine

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[(no longer active)]

STR:

1. Get a new machine!
2. Move your Firefox profile over to the new machine.
3. about:newtab will stop having screenshots.

And they will never come back!

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Hey Mark,

You worked on background thumbnailing, right? Any idea what the deal is here?

-Mike

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Thumbnails are stored in the "local" profile directory - I can't remember the terminology, but on Windows, it's the profile directory under AppData/Local, rather than the normal directory under AppData/Roaming.  What should happen though is that the thumbnails are re-created automagically after the profile has been moved.

Comment 3

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Oh, I missed this:

(In reply to :Ehsan Akhgari (needinfo? me!) from comment #0)
> 3. about:newtab will stop having screenshots.
> 
> And they will never come back!

Assuming you are on Aurora or Nightly, the fact they don't come back is a problem.  b/g thumbnails should move to Beta after the next merge, so if you are testing there or on release, it's expected.

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Oh, I missed this:
> 
> (In reply to :Ehsan Akhgari (needinfo? me!) from comment #0)
> > 3. about:newtab will stop having screenshots.
> > 
> > And they will never come back!
> 
> Assuming you are on Aurora or Nightly, the fact they don't come back is a
> problem.  b/g thumbnails should move to Beta after the next merge, so if you
> are testing there or on release, it's expected.

I'm using Nightly.  The reason why I filed this bug is the "not coming back" part, I would expect.  Please note that I didn't move my "local profile" (or whatever that thing is called!) but Jeff (who is CCed here did) and we are both experiencing the exact same problem.

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

I just deleted the entire "temp" profile directory (ie, from the "Local" directory on Windows) and after starting Nightly and loading about:newtab, I correctly saw the thumbnails appear at the rate of about 1 every 10 seconds.  IIRC, Drew is also on Mac, so maybe he might be able to repro there (eg, I was wondering if we correctly re-created that top-level temp profile dir - it seems we do on Windows)

Comment 6

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

I couldn't reproduce with these steps:

1. Start Firefox with -P
2. Create a new profile
3. Quit Firefox
4. rm -rf new-profile-dir/*
5. cp -R old-profile-dir/* new-profile-dir/*
6. Start Firefox with the new profile

Ehsan, it shouldn't matter, but were the sub-steps in comment 0's step 2 substantially different from that?

Could you please use the Inspector tool on about:newtab?  If you inspect a tile, you should see a <div class="newtab-cell">.  Under that, you should see

<div class="newtab-site">
  <a class="newtab-link" title="..." href="http://...">
    <span class="newtab-thumbnail" style="background-image: url("moz-page-thumb://...">

Comment 7

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Do you have browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled set to true?

Comment 8

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to :Gavin Sharp (email [e-mail]) from comment #7)
> Do you have browser.pagethumbnails.capturing_disabled set to true?

Yes.

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Turns out this was caused by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=899064#c19.