Delayed refresh for thumbnail updates

[neilalphazeta]

Over the last number of months the New Tab Tools add on tends to refresh the thumbnail too soon resulting in the thumbnail pictures for certain sites to be missing images. As a result it is required to do a manual refresh of the thumbnail once everything is loaded. It happens for a lot of news sites and other sites that now delay the appearance of images till the last moment. I was wondering whether in future version of New Tab Tools could we possibly get a thumbnail delay of say even 1 second as an option in settings. This would correct the problem.

Love this add on otherwise, it's the best of the best on FireFox. Thank you for making such an awesome add on.

[m-7761]

How are you manually refreshing? That feature has been sorely absent forever. Is it in the public add-on? My automatic updates are on. Honestly the thumbnail problem is making me to think what are alternatives to this add-on?

[denishowe]

When viewing a site that is pinned in New Tab Tools, left-click the NTT icon in the toolbar and select "Capture thumbnail".

[m-7761]

I don't have a "Capture thumbnail" option on mine. My only icons are a gear and a padlock.

Version
90.3
Last Updated
December 11, 2019

Is auto updating not working? I guess I should try that reinstall procedure. Thanks though!

[denishowe]

You're looking at the NTT page (the page that displays the tiles with their thumbnails), aren't you? I said "when viewing a site", i.e. when you are looking at the page you want to bookmark. You need to make sure the NTT (spanner and screwdriver) icon is showing in your extensions toolbar - right-click anywhere on the toolbar and select Customise if it isn't.

[m-7761]

Thanks for this insight! I actually looked for such an icon in the toolbar menu, but I guess I didn't scrutinize the names closely, and didn't expect NNT to have such a generic icon! That said, I'm not having success with the Capture Thumbnail tool in changing the thumbnails on the New Tabs page.

I'm not sure why I have such fidelity to this add-on but it does seem more sensible than FF home-pages throughout the years, although I swear a decade or more ago the FF home-page used to be like NTT's home-page.

[m-7761]

Follow-up: I was able to make Capture Thumbnail work for many sites that were redirecting to https:// by resetting NTT to https URLs. I think it doesn't understand redirection. It doesn't work on my own personal website (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net) ATM maybe because it does redirect to a different folder on the server, but I always thought that's transparent to HTTP agents. (Edited: for the record it has worked on my site in the past. Whenever the site hits a Bad Gateway error NTT prefers the static HTML error page thumbnail. The last time it was working was before hitting an error one day. It may be confused about its real location based on my browser cache.)

At any rate, if NTT is still in development, thumbnails should understand redirection. I will try to make a new Issue about redirection soon. I wonder how many people use NTT?

[denishowe]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 at 19:36, Mick Pearson notifications@github.com wrote:

It doesn't work on my own personal website ( http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/)

I was able to add that URL and capture a thumbnail fine.

It won't work if you create a tile with a certain URL and then try to capture a thumbnail for that tile when looking at a page with a different URL, but you wouldn't really expect it to. Nothing to do with redirects particularly.

[m-7761]

Thanks for letting me know that. I disagree with your latter assessment since it's a usability thing, and if bookmarks or URLs can find the site then a NTT should also. There's nothing to tell you when you have the URL wrong. Redirects are part of a web page. Basic software aims to eliminate easy points of failure. (I wonder what could've poisoned my installs' ability to capture this site.)