Progress in Breakpad, Firefox 3 crash report tool

March 29, 2007 - 5:59 pm

The Windows version of recently released Gran Paradiso (Firefox 3 development code name) Alpha 3 and subsequent nightlies, already include a development version Breakpad, the new open source crash reporting tool, formerly known as Airbag, that will replace Talkback, the currently closed source and unmaintained software included with Firefox and Thunderbird.

Benjamin Smedberg, one of the developers of Breakpad provided details on how to give it a try. So I tried it, and while there’s little to tell from an end user point of view, it’s good to see work is very advanced, as in fact, it already works. I crashed Gran Paradiso following a link provided and I was asked to enable the crash reporter.

Enable Breakpad dialog

A progress bar showed the report compilation and sending and finally a successful message.

Breakpad sending a report

A development server has been set to receive the crash reports and report on the crashes as well. The following is my crash report.

A Breakpad report sample

While all of these is still in development, clearly all three components (client, server and reporting) are being actively developed towards a full open source Firefox 3.

Comments

Airbag is now Breakpad « Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

March 31, 2007 5:59 pm

[...] Airbag is now Breakpad Published March 30th, 2007 Firefox 3.0 (Gran Paradiso) , Mozilla News , Mozilla Firefox It has been a little over six-months since we posted about Airbag (Airbag coming soon to Mozilla Applications) which was suppose to replace Talkback. Airbag wasn’t implemented in Fx 2 and until the Alpha 3 release wasn’t in Gran Paradiso (Fx 3) either. The crash reporting tool formerly known as Airbag is now called breakpad (no, not brakepad) and is still in development. Look for a fully developed version in the final release of Firefox 3 later this summer (or fall). News Source: Mozilla Links [...]

dblog » Crashing Firefox Goes libcurl

November 8, 2007 5:59 pm

[...] attention lately, but I stumbled over the Breakpad project, which incidentally is gonna be used as crash reporting tool for Firefox 3, and it uses libcurl: “On Linux, libcurl is used for this function, as it is the closest [...]

A deep look to Firefox 3 Beta 3 : Mozilla Links

February 11, 2008 5:59 pm

[...] crashes to Mozilla included with Firefox and Thunderbird, has been replaced with open source Breakpad (formerly [...]

gxg

July 15, 2008 5:59 pm

Is there an option anywhere to enable the crash reporting? I had 3 crashes with the final version on Firefox 3, but they were not reported, I received no message box…

PSHJuly 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am

Take a look at Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/application.ini.
In the [Crash Reporter] group, set Enabled=0.
After that, if your system CrashReporterPrefs are OK, the standard crash report with a stack trace will appear under ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter.

If you need it on Windows, I’m afraid I cannot help you, but I can say that it makes no sense to catch the Mozilla crash report with wireshark/HTTP Analyzer/etc – it looks like it is submitted to the Mozilla site over SSL.