• mastiz's avatar
    [NTP] Fix article suggestion clicks contributing to Most Visited tiles · 30406bdd
    mastiz authored
    There's a need to distinguish clicks on different elements on the NTP:
    a) clicks on Most Visited tiles.
    b) clicks on (newly introduced) article suggestions (aka snippets).
    
    The first should contribute to Most Visited tiles (i.e. boost tiles
    that have been clicked in the past). The second shouldn't.
    
    We choose to achieve this by specifying a referrer for article
    suggestion clicks. This exposes the referrer to third parties, which
    has been discussed and considered a desirable feature.
    
    The fix relies on such a workaround due to the current lack of
    infrastructure to propagate opaque feature-specific data from upper
    layers to navigation history (and sync).
    
    The approach competes with more intrusive/controversial alternatives to
    achieve the same:
    
    1. Use page transition types (LINK vs AUTO_BOOKMARK) to distinguish
       tile clicks from article suggestion clicks: unfortunately both types
       have been used in the past (older versions of Chrome).
    
    2. Introducing a new page transition type or qualifier: this can be
       considered a layering violation.
    
    3. Introduce a dummy redirect by means of a data: schema page.
    
    BUG=645895
    
    Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/2338133006
    Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#419242}
    30406bdd
history_tab_helper.cc 6.52 KB