949655 - Investigation - New tab thumbnails do not refresh

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[Jackson Sul]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131206145833

Steps to reproduce:

Open the new tab window and view thumbnails of visited sites.


Actual results:

The thumbnails do not refresh/update even once the sites have been visited again and again.


Expected results:

The thumbnails should refresh to reflect the new state of the sites.

I'm using Firefox 26.0 on Ubuntu 13.10. Version 25 had no problem. I've tested this with a fresh profile with no extensions and while Firefox will fetch an image to fill in the initially-blank thumbnails, it will then never update them.

Comment 1

[Jackson Sul]

This affects Windows versions as well, see:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2782301

Comment 2

[Jackson Sul]

In the past couple of days a few of the thumbnails have updated once, while others still haven't (all are pages I regularly visit and should, in theory, update every time). I have not noticed any patterns.

Comment 3

[Catalin Varga [QA][:VarCat]]

Please check if the issue occurs using Firefox in safe mode (with your addons disabled):
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode

and a new, empty profile:
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

Comment 4

[Jackson Sul]

The problem remains when using safemode/no add-ons and with a new profile.

Comment 5

[blechri]

It's the same for me using latest Nightly (and have for a long time) on 64bit Linux (Ubuntu).
The thumbnails for my most visited sites are all very old by now.

Comment 6

[matty]

not fixed in Firefox 27.  thumbnails still do not refresh after visiting site.

Comment 7

[matty]

not fixed in Firefox 28.  thumbnails do not refresh after visiting site.  maybe this "bug" has something to do with mozilla's plan to show sponsored ads on the new tab page.  if so that sucks.

Comment 8

[Jackson Sul]

(In reply to matty from comment #7)
> not fixed in Firefox 28.  thumbnails do not refresh after visiting site. 
> maybe this "bug" has something to do with mozilla's plan to show sponsored
> ads on the new tab page.  if so that sucks.

Considering that has not been implemented yet, I doubt it. 

This should be marked confirmed at the least; or are there versions/OSes where this does not happen?

Comment 9

[matty]

still broken in 29.  i have a feeling this will never be fixed if they haven't fixed it by now (4 versions after breaking).

Comment 10

[Jackson Sul]

This is still a problem with the redesigned new tab page in Firefox 31.

I've noticed that while thumbnails do not update upon each page visit as they did back in version 25, certain sites get a new thumbnail faster than others. No clue why this is the case.

For instance, random Tumblrs I have pinned will be updated after a week or so, while others simply never seem to update, such as a Flickr page (which adds new pictures regularly) I have pinned that has not updated its thumbnail in over three months!

Comment 11

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

Still an issue in 35.0a1 (2014-09-22). Tested with http://money.cnn.com/

Comment 13

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

This looks intentional http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/thumbnails/PageThumbs.jsm#295-311

Would a patch here even be accepted?

Comment 14

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

Perhaps I can just make http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/thumbnails/PageThumbs.jsm#23 MAX_THUMBNAIL_AGE_SECS customizable by using a pref?

Right now MAX_THUMBNAIL_AGE_SECS is hard-coded to 2 days

Comment 15

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

Drew and Mark have worked on this more recently (though Drew is away at the moment).

Comment 16

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

Firefox has two thumbnailers. The foreground thumbnailer takes screenshots while you're browsing, at most every two days per website though (which I really think should not be exposed as a pref).

The background thumbnailer takes screenshots for sites where the foreground thumbnailer couldn't take a screenshot due to e.g. privacy reasons. Now if there's a page that never gets captured by the foreground thumbnailer, then the thumbnail might never update as the background thumbnailer doesn't check the file date.

So a solution might be to use PageThumbsStorage.isFileRecentForURL() instead of .fileExistsForURL() in BackgroundPageThumbs.captureIfMissing() - captureIfMissing() needs a new name then too. This would make us use the same definition of staleness for thumbnails captured only by the background thumbnailer as well.

*However*, the problem with this is that we never wanted to override pictures taken by the foreground thumbnailer with pictures taken by the background thumbnailer, as the latter loads pages without cookies and tends to display a more general version of a site.

In order to properly implement this we would then have to ensure that the background thumbnailer only overrides pictures that it itself has taken. I am not sure how to do that, though... File attributes or the like would be nice but this sounds like something that isn't cross-platform.

Comment 17

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (limited availability, work week) from comment #16)
> *However*, the problem with this is that we never wanted to override
> pictures taken by the foreground thumbnailer with pictures taken by the
> background thumbnailer, as the latter loads pages without cookies and tends
> to display a more general version of a site.

OTOH we could of course also decide that having a more up-to-date but more general thumbnail of a site is better than never updating it because you haven't visited the site for ages...

With background captures being triggered by just opening about:newtab this would however mean that we probably wouldn't ever use the foreground thumbnailer again as the background thumbnailer would mostly be faster to update after two days of staleness because about:newtab is shown so often and mostly before navigating to any page.

Comment 18

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

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (limited availability, work week) from comment #17)

> OTOH we could of course also decide that having a more up-to-date but more
> general thumbnail of a site is better than never updating it because you
> haven't visited the site for ages...

IIRC, the issue there was when a site required a (cookie-based) login but the f/g thumbnailer *could* capture it - as soon as the b/g service decided it was old enough, the "good but stale" foreground thumbnail was replaced with "please login" form.  I'm sure there's an ascii-art matrix in here somewhere ;)

Dao: not sure what the needinfo was for specifically; the bug you linked to looks correct and I've no further insights since my last comment there.

Comment 19

[Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive)]

(In reply to Mark Hammond [:markh] from comment #18)
> IIRC, the issue there was when a site required a (cookie-based) login but
> the f/g thumbnailer *could* capture it - as soon as the b/g service decided
> it was old enough, the "good but stale" foreground thumbnail was replaced
> with "please login" form.

Yeah that's what I was saying in comment #16. We *could* decide we don't care about that. We could also just switch to using only the background thumbnailer for about:newtab, have sweet OMT capturing and almost never have to care about exposing sensitive data - except the web site itself.

Comment 20

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Tim and Mark covered it well, and I don't have anything to add.  Making a decision about what to do would probably mean adding this bug to an upcoming iteration.

Comment 21

[patriciomartinezlaso]

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] from comment #16)

> So a solution might be to use PageThumbsStorage.isFileRecentForURL() instead
> of .fileExistsForURL() in BackgroundPageThumbs.captureIfMissing() -
> captureIfMissing() needs a new name then too. This would make us use the
> same definition of staleness for thumbnails captured only by the background
> thumbnailer as well.

This suggests there's a workaround: manually deleting the thumbnails. Is that possible?

Comment 22

[:glob ✱]

(In reply to patriciomartinezlaso from comment #21)
> This suggests there's a workaround: manually deleting the thumbnails. Is
> that possible?

no - bug 1030011.

Comment 24

[samuelmarks]

I've been using the Speed Dial extension for years, since Opera introduced it (and I wanted the equivalent in Firefox).

In the top right of the "dial" a small refresh icon is visible. You click this to force thumbnail refresh. Speed Dial also has a bunch of other nice features… including thumbnail cropping and refresh every <interval> settings.

Maybe new versions of this official Firefox feature can include a refresh icon? - Would be especially useful for e.g.: your webmail, blogs and social-networks.

Comment 25

[John Kitz]

(In reply to samuelmarks from comment #24)
> I've been using the Speed Dial extension for years, since Opera introduced
> it (and I wanted the equivalent in Firefox).

Thanks for pointing out the Speed Dial extension, I installed it and although at first glance it looks to be a bit 'overly' customizable it has quite a number of welcome additional features.

>Maybe new versions of this official Firefox feature can include a refresh icon? - Would be especially >useful for e.g.: your webmail, blogs and social-networks.

Also please consider this as an end-user vote of support for you suggestion above.

Comment 27

[pbhj]

This appears to be a duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=756881 too.

Comment 28

[Martin McDowell]

I can't believe this bug was reported way back in 2013 and STILL hasn't been fixed. While on a hotel wifi I tried visiting Statcounter and got a router landing page. This was then used for the Thumbnail. And not even though I am off that wifi and seeing the actual website I am still seeing that landing page in the thumbnail.
This does not reflect well on the state of GFirefox development guys.

Comment 29

[pedder55655]

I totally agree. Its way too often that annoying bugs dont get any attention. I cant believe that my old Opera 12 browser is still years ahead of Firefox and Chrome.

Comment 30

[Stimpo]

I manage a small website so I know exactly when it changes and I can see a pattern for thumbnails not updating.  It isn't that the browser doesnt try, it is that it is running the wrong code or running it at the wrong time.  Every time I update a page I have on the new tab screen it updates the thumbnail to the previous version.  

It is like the thumbnail is being generated from the disk cache before the memory cache is being written to the disk.

If I update the page on 9/16, 9/17, and 9/18 viewing it each day to proof the edits.  When I view it on 9/17 is shows the 9/16 version thumbnail.  Even reloading it repeatedly it shows the 9/16 version (as the date/time the timestamp was last cached on is after the 9/17 revision time).  When I update it on 9/18 and have viewed it, it displays the 9/18 version it generates the 9/17 thumbnail.

Comment 31

[Matthew]

This is happening on a few web sites. Bing www.bing.com was updating regularly until about a week ago. It no longer updates now.

Also, www.accuweather.com never updates.

Comment 32

[neekbeta]

Would it be out of the question to ask for a contextual menu item for page previews? It could be ‘Refresh this preview’ or a similarly worded item.

I tried removing the bookmark and then dragging the URL back in, but the previous image doesn’t get readily cleared out.

One workaround, add a hash fragment to the URL of the site or page you want to add. So example.org becomes example.org/# The New Tab Page will go and fetch a new image, unfortunately there’s no (easy or any, I haven’t looked) way to edit the URL.

Comment 33

[crr]

Found a workaround:

The thumbnails are located in ...\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<your profile here>\thumbnails

Deleting the respective file will blank out the thumbnail, which should be updated/recreated upon visiting the page.

Comment 34

[neekbeta]

crr, any idea where those thumbnails are stored on a Mac?

The corresponding folder inside ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles has nothing like that.

> $ find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/9o8pk65q.default-1493461485999/ -name "thumbnails"
> [nothing]

Comment 35

[:glob ✱]

(In reply to neekbeta from comment #34)
> crr, any idea where those thumbnails are stored on a Mac?

~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/{profile}/thumbnails

Comment 36

[neekbeta]

(In reply to Byron Jones ‹:glob› from comment #35)

Thanks Byron, one thing to note though, at first glance the directory ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles/ exists, but appears to be empty.

Using the terminal, it shows a hidden folder in there, the {profile} folder. Sure enough, deleting a thumbnail and then revisiting the URL forces it to be recreated.

Comment 37

[Jessilyn Davis]

Hello!

This bug has been closed due to inactivity and/or the potential for this bug to no longer be an issue with the new Discovery Stream-powered New Tab experience.

Please help us triage by reopening if this issue still persists and should be addressed.

Thanks!