"Brave starts with Dashboard" incompatible with "A new tab shows Blank page"

[Zuzu-Typ]

Did you search for similar issues before submitting this one?
I did a quick search

Describe the issue you encountered:
Brave doesn't always start the Dashboard, even though it is selected in the preferences.

• Platform (Win7, 8, 10? macOS? Linux distro?):
  Windows 10 x64

• Brave Version (revision SHA):
  Brave 1.13.0dev RC5

• Steps to reproduce:

  1. Go to about:preferences
  2. select Dashboard for Brave starts with
  3. select something other than Dashboard for A new tab shows
  4. restart Brave

• Screenshot if needed:

• Any related issues:

[Zuzu-Typ]

Here's an example scenario:
Here are the settings:

On restarting, this is what Brave should do (open the Dashboard):

This is what Brave does though (open a new tab):

[luixxiul]

Nice find!

@bbondy does this block the release?

[bsclifton]

Unable to reproduce with master; I believe this was fixed with d4f79be (RC5 also had an older version of Muon).

Let's re-open if this occurs in the new RC

edit the step I missed was picking "A new tab shows: Blank page". I went off original post which said pick anything except "Dashboard"

[bsclifton]

Re-opening after @NejcZdovc was able to reproduce

[bsclifton]

After implementing a "fix" for this, I strongly believe the fix would introduce unnecessary complexity.

I think we have two better choices we can make:

1. Don't allow folks to pick "Brave starts with Dashboard" if "A new tab shows" is set to "Blank page"
2. Break dashboard out into it's own page, about:dashboard. There would no longer be a conflict, but about:newtab and about:dashboard would be two separate pages.

Both options get rid of the conflict. Letting someone launch into dashboard where they can see stats and tiles is useless IMO if there's not a way for them to get back (because new tabs would only show blank).

My personal preference would be choice 1 for now. We could create an issue for choice 2 and push to the contributor backlog

cc: @bradleyrichter @cezaraugusto @NejcZdovc

[bsclifton]

Talked with @bradleyrichter and we decided to chose another option:

• revert text back to "a new tab" (under when Brave launches)
• created issue for properly fixing this by creating a new about:dashboard page which can be tracked with Dashboard-like version of about:newtab should also be available as about:dashboard #6823

I marked as release notes exclude since this new "dashboard" choice was introduced with 0.13.0 with #5690

[bsclifton]

Test Plan

1. Go to about:preferences
2. Ensure "Brave starts with" dropdown no longer has "Dashboard"; it should have "a new tab"