Week-Long Effort to Clean Up Bugzilla Crash Bug Reports StartingSunday March 28th, 2004In a weblog posting, Asa Dotzler announces a new effort to triage crash bug reports: "I'm going to be working to organize a week long bug cleanup effort for reported crashers. We have many hundreds of crashers reported in Bugzilla which need confirmation or resolving. With Talkback in 1.7 beta, we can easily get stack traces for reproducible crashers and that should help us resolve quite a few duplicate reports. Starting with Tuesday's BugDay, and going through the end of the week, I'll be available to help newbies and veterans alike as we slog through hundreds of bug reports and try to get a real fix on known stability problems in advance of 1.7 branching. If you're interested in being a part of this effort and need help getting started, join us on Tuesday in #mozillazine on irc.mozilla.org." This article reminded me of something I read about Windows Error Reporting not so long ago. I thought I would mention this here in case it's of any help. Regarding the error reports that Windows XP sends back to Microsoft when an application crashes, they are accessible for any developer. I think I read that the developers in question had to get a security certificate that had a cost of $400. But best to read it all from the sources: The original post in one of Microsoft developer blog (Watson developer): http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/02/04/67276.aspx From the comments in that post, where to go to access all this information: https://winqual.microsoft.com/info/default.aspx The last link might need to be visited by IE. The div or whatever is hidden and there is no clickability over the "More" link when visiting with Mozilla. Hold on, here is the content of that for those without IE, with manually added links: When Windows users experience an error, they are asked to send a report to Microsoft. Microsoft then makes this data available to independent software vendors (ISVs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). To access WER data, you must: Establish a Winqual account. How?(https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/admin_help/create_account.aspx) Sign up(https://winqual.microsoft.com/signup). Accept the Microsoft Windows Error Reporting Agreement. Read the agreement. Learn more about why you should use WER (https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/wer_help/biz.aspx). Learn more about how WER works and how to implement WER (https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/wer_help/dev.aspx) I think this effort will be very helpful. From experience, I'd recommend to anyone new to working on crashers to use a separate IRC agent like HydraIRC or mIRC instead of Chatzilla, otherwise it will go down with every crash. It also helps to do most of your bugzilla searching in IE (gasp) so you don't lose track of what you were working on and have to keep to querying bugzilla over and over again. You don't need to switch as far as IE and mIRC. As an alternative, you can run chatzilla as a Firefox extension, so you can do your IRC and bug browsing in Firefox, while crashing your Mozilla. I was wondering which bug this is. When I right-click on Flash movies sometimes Firefox sometimes crashes on Linux GTK XFT2 builds. I downloaded the lastest flash plugin off of macromedia's site but it didn't fix it. The nightly builds of Firefox still appear to crash with this right click bug. Definately a block bug for me. Don't know if this will help at all, but you may want to try this trick to see if there's any improvement: Speeding up Flash animation in GTK-2.x+ Mozilla/Firefox http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8574 Unfortunately, the talkback agent is not included in the tar and zip distributions, which I and probably many others prefer because of the easy way to update to a newer buld. Unfortunately, it is probably the power users, whose crash data are thus missing. Also, and possibly more significant, talkback is not yet back in the nightly builds, so there's no crash data from people that use those either. That's part of the reason for doing this cleanup drive - to work on the bug reports that have come in while talkback has been lacking. They're working on getting talkback automation in other builds and automating the production of talkback reports as well, but that's not going to happen in time to fix bugs for the 1.7 release. Heh. As someone that uses .zip'ed nightlies, I guess that makes me twice-unlucky. ;-) Seriously, though, while Mozilla Suite is ultrastable compared to IE (on Win XP and Win2K), I did notice a bit more crashes in the last 3-4 weeks compared to normal. Not often. Maybe once a week with heavy usage (I do exit my browser every few hours, though, when I get up to get some circulation. :-) ) Can't wait 'til the .zip talkbacks come out again. I really want to start sending in some crash reports. ;-) For what it's worth, crashes aren't really my problem these days. I can't remember the last time it happened. I'm sure it does once in a blue moon, but so rarely I forget that it even used to happen. :) Good job! What I really want to see is snappier UI in the unix-versions. I use Windows at work and FreeBSD at home. The UI in Windows is HYPER-responsive compared to the unix one. You'd think that based upon the architecture, it'd be the other way around, but I suspect that the visibility of the Windows platform means there's more focus there. I could be wrong. But I wish there weren't all these tiny lags as I do stuff (open tabs, switch tabs, try and open another tab while a different tab is still loading, open new windows, open dialogs/prefs, work with bookmarks, etc). I'm not bitching, just trying to provide feedback. :) |