Closed Bug 431439 Opened 16 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Add about:crashes button in prefs

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Preferences
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: dmosedale, Unassigned)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug)

Details

(Whiteboard: [notacrash])

Attachments

(1 file, 2 obsolete files)

unbitrotted and rearranged
3.47 KB, patch
Details | Diff | Splinter Review 
On a plane flight last week, I got about:crashes mostly working in Thunderbird.  It doesn't yet have the CSS love that it might (should probably really be using a XUL window here)...
Depends on: 445503
I have taken the crashes.xhtml changes into bug 445503 so that we can get them into mozilla-central. This will mean that about:crashes as a mail start page will work fully when we move to hg.
I think CSS & XUL love is an example of me letting perfect be the enemy of good here.  I'll get a new iteration of this patch ready for review here in order to rectify that situation.
Assignee: nobody → dmose
Attached patch patch, v2 (obsolete) — — Splinter Review 
Updated patch for comm-central; toolkit changes no longer necessary.  Still some styling issues with this patch.
Attachment #318512 - Attachment is obsolete: true
I'm close to implementing an extension to trigger about:crashes in TB until this lands..
Flags: wanted-thunderbird3?
(In reply to comment #4)
> I'm close to implementing an extension to trigger about:crashes in TB until
> this lands..

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9695

ViewAbout does about:crashes and a host of other about: windows too.
This feels high-leverage for folks doing support; marking wanted+.
Flags: wanted-thunderbird3? → wanted-thunderbird3+
So what part is this bug about? about:crashes works fine as start page url, and having ui for it seems redundant to me. Better left to extensions (such as garys, or ntt) as it's not something any end user should really ever have to deal with.
Until we see a Thunderbird 3+ with phenomenal up time, my sympathies are:

a) Beyond pure "prevention" of bugs and crashes, there should be cases where we put in the hands of users empowering tools which help raise the quality of Thunderbird.

b) When that tool is trivial, especially for the user non-technical in crisis, I rather think the mindset about crashes should be flipped - for example a crash might be a blocker for a user, even though it is #500 in the crash rankings.  And from a triage point of view I would really like to see every crash bug filed with a crash id, and not have the burden and loss of time in referring a reporter to some other tool or documentation. 

I think of this as being at least on par with "Show me Update History".  (And it wouldn't hurt if we got volunteers out of it - though that's perhaps not complelling.)
I tend to agree with Wayne here.  Reassigning to clarkbw for a ui-review+ or -.
Assignee: dmose → clarkbw
Fixing the summary, since I keep seeing bugmail subjects and saying "but it _does_ work!"
Component: General → Preferences
QA Contact: general → preferences
Summary: make about:crashes work on Thunderbird → Add about:crashes button in prefs
Version: unspecified → Trunk
I'm not really sure what this is asking for.  A button in the prefs that opens the About Crashes window?  Similar to the Config Editor?  If so I think you could take a spot beside the Config Editor button for this kind of button.
Yeah, don't read the bug, that's just confusing - the patch is exactly that (other than being a little rotted since it's a groupbox now):

-- Advanced configuration --------------------------

[ ] Enable Message Indexer
                                       [ Config Editor... ]
View list of submitted crash reports   [ View Reports... ]

The best thing about doing ASCII art instead of a screenshot is how it accentuates the need to do something other than checkbox+label, button-right, description+button-right, though I'm not sure quite what. Are we planning on shipping with the gloda checkbox there?
I don't think we plan on shipping with the Message Indexer checkbox, that should just be for beta testing.

But now this thing will require some text+button for the config editor, thanks!

We'll probably need to make the section title generically advanced as well.  Something like this.

-- Advanced Options --------------------------

Advanced, under the hood settings     ( Config Editor... )
View list of submitted crash reports   ( View Reports... )
can we drive this in with the other preference changes?
I changed this patch up because I hate trying to get the wording right on these very advanced debug options.  Instead I just added the button and aligned it in a way that I'm more comfortable with.

Now it looks like this:

= Advanced Configuration =

[x] Enable Gloda

( View Crash Reports... )                         ( Config Editor... )

Maybe philor can take a look?
Attachment #334808 - Attachment is obsolete: true
Attachment #378715 - Flags: review?(philringnalda)
Tell me stories about this pane, that will make it make sense to me.

We have very few (and thus arguably a buggy few), and Firefox has zero, panes where there are groupboxes and also "Description [Button]" pairs that are not in a groupbox, which makes me think that the naked return receipt pair is wrong.

Looking for parallels for the "Advanced Configuration" groupbox ("a bunch of things which are only related by being things that belong on that pane, and aren't clearly separate groups"), what I found was the unlabeled groupbox in Composition - General (which would be labeled "General Composition" or something similarly redundant), and the unlabeled groupbox in Firefox's Content. So unless we have some reason to want to be utterly different in this one pane, I'd think we'd want

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                           |
| [x] Go Go Gloda                                                           |
|                                                                           |
| [ View Crash Reports... ]                               [ Config Editor ] |
|                                                                           |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+--- Return Receipts -------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                           |
| Determine how Thunderbird handles return receipts  [ Return Receipts ]    |
|                                                                           |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+--- System Integration ----------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                           |
...

(drawn in Windows style, since Linux and Mac are silly buggers that make groupboxes very nearly nothing, and unlabeled groupboxes even more nearly nothing, but that's their own fault)
I like this change of order.  You might also like what I did in bug 448705 to create a "Composition" group.
It's starting to come back to me, how much I hate prefs UI design. I'd rather have them all ungrouped than have the UI for "when I receive a return receipt request" stuck behind a button in a "Composition" group. That's the sort of thing that causes people to file "you removed it!" bugs, because they didn't even bother trying the button to find out whether "Composition" meant "Both Composition and Receiving".
Attachment #378715 - Flags: review?(philringnalda)
Comment on attachment 378715 [details] [diff] [review]
unbitrotted and rearranged

removing review so I'm not reminded of the pain here.

And honestly I'm really not sure what to do here.  I'd like to say 'extension worthy' as it feels that way.
extension is certainly the low pain path. and I certainly like the ViewAbout extension.

But as a proponent of the original idea I am loath to give it up.  Being open source it is important to get users involved and having functionality in the product (ie. more than words that say, "go here") that help guide a user down that path is a good thing. I had hoped this simple bug request would be an entre to a larger strategy/idea of encouraging (and making it easier people to take charge of their own issues without first getting outside help or doing a search for something. Frankly I think this is one area where FF is missing the boat. 

For those purposes however, having this in prefs eliminates some controversy about polluting the main UI (eg. Help), but it also buries it where users won't easily find it.  So, perhaps this needs to be part of a bigger think on the issues I raise above.  And I'd still like to see us do something for TB3 while people are excited and perhaps eager to get involved.
I really don't think Firefox has "missed the boat" - certainly not in the about:crashes area. It is so easy for a web browser user to read some documentation, type about:crashes and get the information required.

To be honest I think including a "View crashes" button could even be taken as a "we crash a lot, get scared" by some users, although admittedly it is much easier for QA. So I'm not sure what to do here, though I would recommend opening in a content tab rather than the message preview pane or a separate window.
(sorry for the poor formatting above)

I was thinking and forgot to add (which tempers my comment about FF), that FF does a very nice up front job in some areas of getting users involved. Two example area of Help
* Report Broken Website
* Report Web Forgery
And the stuff from Help>Help Contents leads to nicely structured content.

But I just think it doesn't pay to be more reserved about tooting your horn, and being more up front in getting people involved. Putting it up on web pages like http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html is good. But having some stuff closer to the customer is also good.  


(In reply to comment #21)
> I really don't think Firefox has "missed the boat" - certainly not in the
> about:crashes area. It is so easy for a web browser user to read some
> documentation, type about:crashes and get the information required.

But it's not fully empowering/"self service"
- they still must search for something and fall upon a hit for about:crashes is my point, which presupposes they even know what to search for. Plus they'll only do that when they have a problem.  
- conversely having a menu item of (for lack of a better name) Help>Problems or Help>Support is up front, and intuitive.  
- someone looking at the menus even if they don't have a problem can become curious enough to want to learn more, and become involved.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+Help?style_mode=inproduct reached from Help>Help Contents gets to "support" (listed on the right of the page), but it's one or two steps removed, and it's certainly not a featured item on par with the other content there.
You're assuming a great deal of users want to become involved. Some do, but if they can't be bothered to do a google search for something like this, chances are very low they're interested imo.

Maybe something like the "Your rights" bar on the above the status bar could show up on startup every 10th crash or so?
Awesome!  I think that idea has a lot of promise.  A couple crashes are really likely to get a person involved in helping out, much more than us just asking them.  (don't take that to mean we should cause crashes :) ) I'd probably even tune the number down to 3 crashes and we offer the "How about you lend a hand and we'll fix this problem" notification bar. :)
ah, yes nice idea! Suggest throwing it up on the very first crash, and thereafter at some interval.

as for assumptions...truly I'm not assuming there is a groundswell of interest out there - on the other hand I am saying *we* shouldn't assume people's level of interest. Volunteers are on a percentage basis of the user community a rare enough commodity that I don't like missed opportunities, and I don't like assuming that everyone coming to the project will come through the same route I did our you did. 

If I learned nothing else from being involved in volunteer groups, it's that most people simply don't up and volunteer - they come after either experiencing some pain, after being asked (which they do in fact appreciate) or after being handed some information.  I've seen many a person who was given info or ask, then develop into a top volunteer - but they were never looking for or seeking "a job".
Good points and I think opening up on the first and then interval crashes is a good idea.  Alternate implementations could just open up a tab, similar to the Firefox "That was embarrassing" tab, instead of a notification bar.
(In reply to comment #26)
> Good points and I think opening up on the first and then interval crashes is a
> good idea.  Alternate implementations could just open up a tab, similar to the
> Firefox "That was embarrassing" tab, instead of a notification bar.

These great ideas indeed seem more end-user-friendly versus about:crashes which seems to be more developer-oriented (and whose use-case(s) are probably satisfied by ViewAbout)
(In reply to comment #23)
> Maybe something like the "Your rights" bar on the above the status bar could
> show up on startup every 10th crash or so?

This sounds like a great idea, actually. File it in Toolkit:Breakpad Integration so we can work out the specifics? I think it'd be beneficial for Firefox as well.
Depends on: 511462
Filed bug 511462. As i wrote there, time based appearance could also be an option.
Whiteboard: [notacrash]
I shouldn't be the assignee for these bugs.  Filter against clarkbfilter to delete all these from your emails.
Assignee: clarkbw → nobody
the desired effect is available via help | troubleshooting.
So wontfix or WFM?
Flags: needinfo?(bwinton)
Maybe Duplicate of the bug that added the Troubleshooting Information?

(Dmose, do you care particularly one way or another?)
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(bwinton)
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Nope, I think we're all good here.  Glad that the functionality is now available!
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