409981 - consider rewriting crash reporter client as a XUL application

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

When we initially implemented the crash reporter client, we did it as a set of native platform applications.  The theory was that if we introduced a startup crasher or something like that, the crash reporter would not be useful.  However, this means that we now have 3 native platform GUI implementations to keep in sync.  Doing work on them (as in bug 404855) takes an extraordinarily long time.  In addition, since we're reliant on native platform APIs, we can hit strange bugs like bug 390568, bug 405932, etc.  Letting the crash reporter use the same underlying code as Firefox would eliminate these inconsistencies.

We could still provide a super slimmed down native crash reporter, which could get launched in case of the XUL crash reporter crashing, which could have minimal functionality aside from submitting the report.

I've targetted this at Mozilla 2.  I think it's worth talking about, at least.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I "work" in bugzilla now for several years and a crashing FF on startup usually only happens for nightly builds and I don't think that this would be a problem. 
A xul application would be nice to have, you could also implement a crash ID viewer because a few people have problems to find the hidden path in windows for example.

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I think this would be a lot of work for little benefit at this point.