Airbag to be added to Mozilla applications

Posted by Percy Cabello on September 13th, 2006 • Tags:

Talkback, a crash information reporting tool by SupportSoft, bundled with Firefox and Thunderbird will be replaced with Airbag, a similar open source application. The move to the new crash reporting toll will be done by Mozilla and Google.

If you have ever experienced a Firefox crash, you may have noticed a dialog that appears soon afterwards asking for details on what web page you were visiting and what you were doing as a means to aid developers diagnose and fix the cause. That's Talkback in action.

According to Benjamin Smedberg's post, Airbag, will provide developers and bug reporters, immediate crash stack information on the client, the ability to combine information from "multiple sources, including the XULRunner runtime, application binaries, extensions, plugins, and perhaps even some system libraries"; and "it will hopefully allow [developers] to collect stack information from some kinds of runtime assertions, not just crashes." In summary, it will be a more efficient helper for quality assurance purposes.

Smedberg will add Airbag to XULRunner in the next few weeks.

Comments

skip_g33k said on September 14, 2006, 11:56 am:

I only hope that it will be configurable and support sending through proxy servers. The Talkback doesn’t, or isn’t easily discoverable, and for 5 years now, I haven’t been able to send in a report for any of the numerous crashes I’ve suffered. -sigh-

David Ross said on September 15, 2006, 9:47 am:

I hope this implementation will include the user options to (1) not report the URL being visited and (2) not report at all. Privacy is still important.

percy said on September 15, 2006, 9:55 am:

I already does currently. Talkback will only send any data if you allow it to. There is no automatic reporting.

ffextensionguru said on September 18, 2006, 9:31 pm:

But wouldn’t the URL being visited be one of the most important items needed, so Mozilla can see the site and find out why it caused Firefox to crash.

Airbag coming soon to Mozilla Applications « Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog said on September 18, 2006, 9:51 pm:

[...] Okay, not that type of airbag! Rather a new and improved crash reporting application. This will replace the similar but rather out-dated ‘Talkback’ feature most users are accustom to when a Mozilla application crashes. Like Talkback, Airbag is completely voluntary, you can provided as much (or as little) information as you would prefer to disclose.Â But keep in mind the more information your willing to provide the better the chances of getting the bug fixed that caused the application to crash in the first place. More technical information can be found over at mozilla links Blog. Posted by ffextensionguru Filed in Blogs, Links of Interest, Mozilla News [...]

mozilla links - Mozilla news, tips and more. » Planned features for Firefox 3 said on January 10, 2007, 9:42 pm: