Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX) Reporter
	Description • 13 years ago

The ability for Firefox to create partial thumbnails has potential benefits in features such as New Tab Page.  Currently, thumbnails are generated by taking a snapshot of a page's full width and showing a portion of the page's height.  This produces thumbnails that look like small versions of the full pages themselves.

However, showing only the top left portion of the page may make thumbnails more recognizable overall.  Attached are thumbnails as they are being displayed now in New Tab Page (left column), how they could look taking 2/3 of the page width (middle column), and how they could look with 1/3 of the page width (right column).  Before adding partial thumbnails to any feature, we should test how page recognizability is effected by cutting off some of the page width.  For instance, some pages with strong branding in the upper left may be more easy to recognize, while others with more unusual orientations may be harder to recognize (such as Wikipedia).

I'm marking this as an enhancement for now - it would be great to try this out, perhaps with Test Pilot or Mechanical Turk - but it should not block New Tab as a feature from landing.

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 1 • 13 years ago

Uses only the top 25% of a page to take a screenshot from.

	matthias koplenig [:metasieben]
	Comment 2 • 13 years ago

ttaubert this looks really nice.

maybe increasing the crop to 40-50% would help with edge-cases(eg. centered sites).

	Chris Lee [:clee]
	Comment 3 • 13 years ago

I'm playing with this today and depending on the site it does look a bit strange.  

Sites that are left-aligned will probably look fine.  

Tim, are there any known issues for thumbnails today?  Out of 9 boxes, I see 3 thumbnails showing up.

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 4 • 13 years ago

(In reply to Chris Lee [:clee] from comment #3)
> I'm playing with this today and depending on the site it does look a bit
> strange.  

Yes, 25% doesn't seem ideal. I've already talked to Limi how to make this better and from a first quick look 50% seems to cover a better portion of the depicted web site - though we actually need some more data and usage experience for this.

> Sites that are left-aligned will probably look fine.  

Yes, I too have many centered sites that look just ugly, tbh. We could try detecting the X offset of a page and adjust the crop rect. Not sure though how easy that is.

As this is a follow-up bug and currently blocks bug 716538, I'm not sure it should. I think we can live with whole-page thumbnails (that's the way Chrome does it, too). IMHO this shouldn't block getting Nightly tester feedback and we should have rather 'safe thumbnails' for a first testing experience... what do you think?

> Tim, are there any known issues for thumbnails today?  Out of 9 boxes, I see
> 3 thumbnails showing up.

I have no issues with thumbnails not being rendered... Are these maybe redirecting sites? That would be another bug :)

	Chris Lee [:clee]
	Comment 5 • 13 years ago

> I have no issues with thumbnails not being rendered... Are these maybe
> redirecting sites? That would be another bug :)

Some of redirects, but others are not.  I have Facebook login, ldap phonebook, Google docs, etc.  Any idea why this isn't loading?  I can file a separate bug if there isn't one already.

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 6 • 13 years ago

Testing top 50%.

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 7 • 13 years ago

(In reply to Chris Lee [:clee] from comment #5)
> Some of redirects, but others are not.  I have Facebook login, ldap
> phonebook, Google docs, etc.  Any idea why this isn't loading?  I can file a
> separate bug if there isn't one already.

You can file one if you want, I have no idea (yet) why they're not loading (except for the redirects).

	Chris Lee [:clee]
	Comment 8 • 13 years ago

(In reply to Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] from comment #6)
> Created attachment 589177 [details] [diff] [review]
> patch v2
> 
> Testing top 50%.

Has this patch been landed on UX branch?  I'm still seeing top right 25% of the page in my thumbnails?

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 9 • 12 years ago

Do we still want this or can we close it?

	Chris Lee [:clee]
	Comment 10 • 12 years ago

I think we can close this.

	Tim Taubert [:ttaubert] (inactive) Assignee
	Comment 11 • 12 years ago

Ok, thank you, closing.

	Chris Lee (:cleer)
	Comment 12 • 12 years ago

(In reply to Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (Firefox UX) from comment #0)
> The ability for Firefox to create partial thumbnails has potential benefits
> in features such as New Tab Page.  Currently, thumbnails are generated by
> taking a snapshot of a page's full width and showing a portion of the page's
> height.  This produces thumbnails that look like small versions of the full
> pages themselves.
> 
> However, showing only the top left portion of the page may make thumbnails
> more recognizable overall.  Attached are thumbnails as they are being
> displayed now in New Tab Page (left column), how they could look taking 2/3
> of the page width (middle column), and how they could look with 1/3 of the
> page width (right column).  Before adding partial thumbnails to any feature,
> we should test how page recognizability is effected by cutting off some of
> the page width.  For instance, some pages with strong branding in the upper
> left may be more easy to recognize, while others with more unusual
> orientations may be harder to recognize (such as Wikipedia).
> 
> I'm marking this as an enhancement for now - it would be great to try this
> out, perhaps with Test Pilot or Mechanical Turk - but it should not block
> New Tab as a feature from landing.

	Chris Lee (:cleer)
	Comment 13 • 12 years ago

^ Sorry, Bugzilla misclick.