2009821 - Automatic crash submission settings have no effect on main process crashes

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

The preference associated with automatic crash submission is only used for tab (content) crashes and submitting pending crashes (e.g., if a submission previously failed, or if there are background process crashes). We should decide whether and how it should affect main process crashes (the crash reporter client). The crash reporter client already has best-effort access to the preferences file as that was necessary for l10n, so it may not be a big lift to read that. We could also store the setting in a crash annotation, or access it in the main process crash handler (maybe in a static) and pass it along as an argument/env variable.

We should decide what sort of UX flow occurs here. It is likely best to still show the crash reporter dialog with the options to quit/restart Firefox, so the user doesn't experience Firefox restarting without additional context about why that happened. The dialog could still automatically submit the crash in this case. It's also beneficial to show the client in the event of a startup/repetitive crash, so the user has an opportunity to easily exit a restart loop.

Comment 1

[Alex Franchuk [:afranchuk]]

We may not want to automatically submit the report, but instead set the "Submit this report" checkbox. This allows a user to choose to not submit a report that otherwise would be submitted (because if the automatic crash submission preference is enabled, even if they close the crash reporter client window, the pending crash would be sent when Firefox next restarts). This seems to be the current behavior of the tab crash page.

If the setting is enabled, though, we should make it clear that the report will be sent if you don't explicitly uncheck the option (perhaps with some call-out in the dialog, and something similar in the tab crash page, since that currently doesn't make it clear).