A or B would be best. :) Could we get any info from the image ahead of time, like the primary color?

No, there's no way to get that info. We could do some similar calculations to what we do with the ML scrabble tiles though, where we try to get the favicon dominant color and fall back to gray if we don't have it.

If we do A, the card will re-layout the contents if we are unable to download the image just like in the attached video.

The current implementation is A), where space is blank until we get a thumbnail, which replaces it, or fail to get one, in which case we relayout the contents, as May said.

About the favicon color option: how is that different from the thumbnail color? We would have to get the favicon, which is most likely smaller, but still... Also I think it's better to have a full width text when we have no thumbnail.

Another option that was mentioned during the standup is to display the card only when we have the thumbnail. That means that we would download the thumbnails in advance, as we initialize the NTP, instead of when the card becomes visible. That raises data usage and snippet display latency concerns though. 

Re: favicon, we will have the favicon already cached if the user has visited the site previously so no need to hit the network.

I've attached an image of what Google Now does - it probably makes sense to stay consistent with this. They use a grey background with an image icon overlaid. 

I've also attached an example of what inbox does - they use the image from go/icons overlaid (search "photo"). The icon in this case seems simpler, so I'd go with that one.

Deleted: IMG_3117.PNG 144 KB

	IMG_3117.PNG 144 KB View Download

Deleted: IMG_3121.PNG 112 KB

	IMG_3121.PNG 112 KB View Download

Thanks, sounds good. I'll to this then:

- If there is no thumbnail URL, we let the text take the whole space
- While we are fetching the thumbnail from a URL, we use the placeholder icon
- If we got the thumbnail, we use it
- If thumbnail fetching failed, we leave the placeholder icon in place

FYI, there should always be a thumbnail after since https://codereview.chromium.org/1868523002/ was landed. If we don't have a thumbnail, that's a bug.

One more strategy would be to simply wait for the thumbnail before showing the snippet at all.
Also note that this almost certainly has overlap with  bug 584429 .

Doing that would mean that we would download thumbnails snippets while we don't know if they are going to be shown. I'm planning to implement the placeholder first, add thumbnail fetching when we start pulling up snippets second, and then when we address  issue 602259 , we could load them from a persistent storage.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d

commit 204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d
Author: dgn <dgn@chromium.org>
Date: Thu Apr 14 08:41:43 2016

[NTP Snippets] Add placeholders and start caching thumbnails

Adds placeholders that are displayed while the thumbnail is being
fetched from the network, and keeps the downloaded thumbnail while
we stay on the NTP.

BUG= 601456 

Review URL: https://codereview.chromium.org/1871343006

Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#387262}

[add] https://crrev.com/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d/chrome/android/java/res/drawable/ic_snippet_thumbnail_placeholder.xml
[modify] https://crrev.com/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d/chrome/android/java/res/layout/new_tab_page_snippets_card.xml
[modify] https://crrev.com/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d/chrome/android/java/res/values/colors.xml
[modify] https://crrev.com/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/ntp/snippets/SnippetArticle.java
[modify] https://crrev.com/204cf9c4eb767c7f8cfbd85267c4b9e87b62067d/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/ntp/snippets/SnippetArticleViewHolder.java

Preview with GIN-2g + Animations-duration x5: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPsMdfHEn65WGkIPp7TJ_AK3c3PRZf8tiLNNQANsUZEMekyXR5apxMr36xs-GW4JA/photo/AF1QipNnzvlfzBGUwT-F5-3Xj_O4l8HBSxIclwbO4U0t?key=clhjUVVsWEh5eHBKWlFSOFc4SzhEbDdLZ3pFMlBR