Closed Bug 382540 Opened 18 years ago Closed 4 years ago

[Mac] When Firefox crashes, crash reporter opens in the background

Categories

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Product:
Toolkit
Component:
Crash Reporting
Platform:
PowerPC
macOS
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
major

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1498433

People

(Reporter: alqahira, Unassigned)

Details

(Whiteboard: [notacrash])

When Minefield crashes, the Mozilla Crash Reporter ("crashreporter") app launches in the background (and doesn't bounce the Dock icon). This is a pretty serious problem; this means no one will notice there's a crashreporter up there (unless they're pedantic and wonder why the OS crash dialogue didn't appear or happen to notice that funny generic icon in the Dock, or have no other apps open), and thus no reports. By contrast, Talkback would always force its way to being the frontmost app, and bounce its Dock icon in case you missed the app appearing (by switching to another app just as Talkback was coming up, or whatnot). (To test, visit https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=258932 or some other crash testcase.)
crashreporter isn't a XUL app, though, AKAIK; it's a tiny little Cocoa app. Or is Minefield supposed to be passing that -foreground to crashreporter when Minefield crashes?
The crashreporter app is a native app, and it doesn't have a -foreground switch. I have noticed on windows as well that it occasionally winds up in the background.
Ah, very true. This is a separate issue.
-foreground is a (Mac-only) hack that I added to support the expected behavior through XRE restarts. We can add a similar hack for the crash reporter, but I suspect that we don't want to, because it's not obvious that doing the "am I in the foreground?" check from the crashing process is safe (it's almost certainly not). We could track the foreground state safely ourselves while the application is running, but that seems like overkill. Probably, it's best to just force the crash reporter to the front when it launches. This seems like the best thing to do, even if the application wasn't in the foreground when it crashed.
It happens on Windows too; when I crash on Windows XP and I have an explorer window open underneath Firefox, Breakpad opens behind that explorer window. Then, when I repeatedly try to remove Firefox to the recycler, I get messages that the program is still in use. In short, it is not easy to discover that Breakpad is open if you don't watch your task bar all the time.
There are LaunchServices functions to handle launching in the foreground or background on Mac OS X (see bug 311391 for some discussion); I poked around toolkit/crashreporter a little bit but was unable to find where the reporter client launching happens with my limited code knowledge.
Whiteboard: [notacrash]
Summary: Crash reporter client opens in the background → [Mac] When Firefox crashes, crash reporter opens in the background
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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