Got the same issue. Clicked to open a new tab, it opened quickly, but the tiles were empty. Opened another one - tiles loaded normally.

Google Chrome	63.0.3239.132 (Official Build) (64-bit)
OS	Mac OS X (10.13.3)

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Speculation from Patrick: possibly we're timing out either fetching from the MostLikely server.

For the original poster: are you signed in and syncing on that client?

Is there a place to look for logs on macOS next time this happens?

I just hit this as well, with the same mv-empty-tiles. In my case I'm signed in and syncing. Refreshing the NTP fixed everything.

[Mac triage]

Happened again, 65.0.3325.181 stable, signed in with google@ account.

However, this time tiles faded into empty ones, i.e. initially NTP page had tiles, but then they (quickly) faded out into empty ones (inspector shows mv-empty-tile).

Maybe related to connectivity issues, as I was on gbus.

Possibly related: issue 821078.

So I'm observing this *very frequently* on Linux. Most recently, I noticed that when the NTP loaded, the tiles appeared to be populated *and then quickly faded to grey*.

This should not happened on the latest Chrome since all the tiles will be loaded at the same time after all of them are loaded successfully. I believe this bug is obsolete and is safe to mark it WontFix. wdyt?

I'm not sure I understand. When I've seen this, it's always been the case that *all* tiles are missing.

Now, I'm not sure if I've seen it on the new release, that doesn't have thumbnails (i.e. has the new, round icons instead).

Hm, I don't think this is an issue with rendering the tiles. From the behavior, it looks like the currently stored MostVisited tiles are replaced with an empty list (hence seeing the populated tiles before it fades to gray in the old design). I agree that this probably is due to a failing fetch, though will need to investigate more.

Thanks all. This appears to be a little challenging to repro. If you see it occurring in M69 (where thumbnails have been replaced with icons, as noted in c#16), please let us know if you see the 'Add Shortcut' icon.

So I just now opened a NTP on Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit), and all my frequently-visited shortcuts were missing. There was a single icon for 'Add Shortcut'.

@wjmaclean: Thanks for the additional info.

Kristi - can you tinvestigate further, when you get a chance?

The NextAction date has arrived: 2018-11-14

WFM: 70.0.3538.110 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)

Just got this again, in 71.0.3578.80 (Official Build) (64-bit) on gLinux.

See the screenshot. Next opened tab had all the tiles.

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BTW, I'm running Chrome Stable with verbose logging, but there is nothing in the log when the issue occurs.

Maybe let's add some logging?

One more data point: when this happens, adding a shortcut causes all other tiles to appear.

Thanks dskiba! Adding a shortcut triggers an update for the list of tiles, so this has a similar effect to refreshing the page. Did you have shortcuts customized (add/edit/delete) when you saw the issue again?