When I restarted Nightly (2017-08-21) on OS X 10.12.6, I noticed that the one tab I had open first painted about:newtab, complete with top left "animal" icon, and *then* reloaded the tab I had open before I quit Firefox. Shouldn't that repaint be avoided in the 'restore tabs' scenario? Seems unnecessary to load up and paint the DOM for about:newtab only to throw it away milliseconds later.

Are you sure it loads about:newtab and not about:home? If it's about:home, this is a duplicate of bug 1054740.

It loads a fox icon, but I can't see fast enough beyond that. Feel free to dupe as "probably dupe", and if we fix bug 1054740 someday, I'll QA it under the theory of "probably fixed".

(In reply to Richard Soderberg [:atoll] from comment #2) > It loads a fox icon, but I can't see fast enough beyond that. Feel free to > dupe as "probably dupe", and if we fix bug 1054740 someday, I'll QA it under > the theory of "probably fixed". That bug actually got fixed and then backed out because it regressed some other stuff, and is on its way to being fixed again. "just not loading about:home" is harder than it sounds, it turns out.

Heh. If only we could local-scope the default home page from the tab's perspective to be the URL being restored into the tab, everything would be simple =)