+ Tim since this is NTP territory and the team in Munich has some work going on to improve the situation of our tiles (Document here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15z7jp9BRloj4adUTWiMhlGGCyqwLBoJHLOIaReTveoA/edit )

Tim: what are the goals for increasing tiles coverage by using ML scaling of icons ? And will the work happening to fetch most likely icons on demand affect iOS positively as well ? (Issue 536988) 

Thanks.

We're hoping to improve the situation of missing icons a lot by M58. This would mean that even if we only find a too small icon, we should be able to defer a background color from it. Right now, I believe we only assign a gray background color if we don't have any icon information at all

Adding Mikel (he's driving the icon effort) to correct me if I that summary is not accurate.

As tschumann@ mentions, we're working on reducing this scenario, by improving the caching strategy and fetching icons on demand. However, some sites don't publish any icon, and hence the current gray fallback icon.

I personally like gambard's idea, which I'd slightly modify: we could hash the hostname and use that to choose among K (26?) colors. It seems a UX question to me, specially considering that those colors might change once you click on the tile (at least until we are finished with the improvements mentioned above).

This'd make debugging harder but hey, CTR could double for those icons.

This is a nice, simple idea. Followed up offline. :)

FYI, I talked to various stakeholders and none brought up any concerns in doing as described above, i.e. choosing an arbitrary color if none is known.

Having said that, I suggest putting this on hold until we integrate the fetching of icons from google servers, which is expected to solve a great fraction of these cases: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=644102

Removing zine ux label

This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

pschaffner as this sounds like a new design task.

I'm seeing varying degrees of grey and some color on my NTP, so I guess this is done/not relevant any longer.