Loading ...Airbag to be added to Mozilla applications
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.
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September 14th, 2006 at 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-
September 15th, 2006 at 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.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I already does currently. Talkback will only send any data if you allow it to. There is no automatic reporting.
September 18th, 2006 at 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.