2058813 - Crash reporter should perhaps suggest an application reinstall if the user is repeatedly crashing at startup

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, enhancement)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Occasionally users end up in state where their Firefox or Thunderbird installation is broken and repeatedly triggers a startup-crash. One recent example is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1681745#c24 which was triggered by a busted update.

When that happens, perhaps the crash reporter dialog could notice that we're repeatedly startup-crashing (e.g. it could detect that we've startup-crashed N times without any successful launches in between; or if it's hard to tell whether there were successful launches, it could detect that we've startup-crashed N times within an hour, or some other time-period); and it could suggest that the user reinstall the application (Firefox or Thunderbird).

(At least in the case of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1681745 , we've been recommending a reinstall to users who've been able to reach out via https://support.mozilla.org and other methods; and it would've been even nicer and would've reached more users if the crash reporter was able to make that suggestion directly.)