Yes, our "prelaunch" screenshot is an open issue. I forget if this something we can do while Chrome Home is still an experiment. Do you know Ted?

I believe we had discussed removing this completely while experimenting with Chrome Home and reintroducing it later at the bottom. It appears to be pretty difficult to support both since the image is specified by a style in the android manifest:

https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/android/java/AndroidManifest.xml?rcl=a9199c53b3525282ba88265be606efe81c2c8477&l=357

Ted and I discussed a couple of hacky ideas for this today:

1) Investigate how Android loads the resource, intersect the request and return a different resource if CH is enabled. We're not sure if this is feasible, but it's worth investigating.

2) Introduce ChromeHomeTabbedActivity and ChromeHomeTabbedActivity2 and remove them after we no longer have to support Chrome Home & non-Chrome Home modes. ChromeLauncherActivity and other internal intents would use those activities instead of ChromeTabbedActivity and ChromeTabbedActivity2 when Chrome Home is enabled. A quick code search shows that we don't use ChromeTabbedActivity.class is very many files, which is good, but this approach will definitely be harder to maintain.

I took a few quick videos of options for the window background we display while Chrome is starting and Chrome Home is enabled. Currently we use the same window background as regular Chrome so the toolbar appears to move from the bottom to the top (video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8YGYtFin7saMDNKRjA4TFJuMXM).

A really simple "fix" would be to change our starting background to white (video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8YGYtFin7saVk15UkZWQWZZWkE). The upside is that this change is one line of code. The downside is that it impacts both regular Chrome and Chrome Home Chrome and our first meaningful draw is delayed.

Another option is to use a different starting window background when Chrome Home is enabled (video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8YGYtFin7saeXlhaVlpX0hVT2s). The upside is that this would retain existing behavior for regular Chrome and fix the starting background for Chrome Home. The downside is that it would require significant engineering work [1] and UX would need to create a new 9-patch.

I think using a white starting background is a reasonable approach, but am curious to hear other opinions.

[1] By the time we can programmatically change the window background, our activity has already been created and the main view has been inflated. The real Android Views are showing, so it's too late to have any impact. In order to have a different staring window background for regular Chrome and Chrome Home Chrome, we would have to introduce new ChromeHomeTabbedActivity classes and direct intents to those instead of regular ChromeTabbedActivity. Combing through the code to make sure all of the intents we dispatch work correctly and any activities already in Android recents are handled correctly will take some time.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/56f8007e48b48058ce86712bde36107fc79e0c5d

commit 56f8007e48b48058ce86712bde36107fc79e0c5d
Author: twellington <twellington@chromium.org>
Date: Mon May 22 22:19:36 2017

[Android] Increase activity intent creation time max

Increase the max duration recorded for
MobileStartup.IntentToCreationTime.ChromeTabbedActivity.

BUG=709240

Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/2897573005
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#473724}

[modify] https://crrev.com/56f8007e48b48058ce86712bde36107fc79e0c5d/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/ChromeTabbedActivity.java

Now that we've branched, we should be good to land this change.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/86716087cc70f251aad2111ec6d86711239c44ab

commit 86716087cc70f251aad2111ec6d86711239c44ab
Author: Theresa Wellington <twellington@google.com>
Date: Mon Jun 26 18:59:06 2017

[Android] Remove starting window background on phones

In order to facilitate the bottom toolbar design, the starting window
background has been changed to white on phones.

BUG=709240

Change-Id: Ie682daf6feb2e73781b60d3a6f2be2539cd7a30f
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/548218
Reviewed-by: Dan Alcantara <dfalcantara@chromium.org>
Commit-Queue: Theresa <twellington@chromium.org>
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#482342}
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-hdpi/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-ldrtl-hdpi-v17/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-ldrtl-mdpi-v17/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-ldrtl-xhdpi-v17/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-ldrtl-xxhdpi-v17/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-mdpi/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-xhdpi/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable-xxhdpi/toolbar_background.9.png
[delete] https://crrev.com/00c0761c39564551613694f9fc69e17e5270f1a4/chrome/android/java/res/drawable/window_background.xml
[add] https://crrev.com/86716087cc70f251aad2111ec6d86711239c44ab/chrome/android/java/res/values-sw600dp-v17/styles.xml
[modify] https://crrev.com/86716087cc70f251aad2111ec6d86711239c44ab/chrome/android/java/res/values-v17/styles.xml

De-prioritizing now that this is white. Leaving open to track adding back 9-patches when we are no longer in experimentation.

Further work is a P3, to be done after Chrome Home launches to 100%

This is post launch. We can't swap out the background until we completely deprecate the non-Chorme Home UI.

Fine-Pri-3.0 was used as a catch-all bucket for M64 work. Pushing this out again.

We can leave this open for updating the starting background for Chrome Modern. Any changes should be coordinated w/ talo@