821711 - Document contents of crash reports

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Robert Kaiser]

In bug 806515 comment #8, Tom Lowenthal requested that we put up good documentation of everything that is in a crash report. Not sure where this belongs component-wise and who can work on actually putting this up, but we need to treat this as a separate item to that other bug, and I'll fill in the info I know here so someone can write up an article with the granularity that makes sense and that Tom thinks is what we should have.


I don't know if I even could tell you "everything in a normal crash report" as I don't know what exactly is or can be included in the minidump.
Ted or Benjamin should know about that - can you add this infom or do you know if we already have that somewhere?

Outside of the minidump, the annotations a B2G crash report currently contains are those:
"Version", "id", "Vendor", "version", "ReleaseChannel", "buildid", "BuildID", "ProductName", "ProductID" (Information about what build this is),
"InstallTime" (Information about the specific installation),
"Notes", "StartupTime", "FramePoisonSize", "FramePoisonBase" (Information about the current run of the build),
"CrashTime", "submitted_timestamp", "timestamp" (Information about the specific crash),
"Android_Hardware", "Android_Device", "Android_CPU_ABI2", "Android_CPU_ABI", "Android_Model", "Android_Brand", "Android_Manufacturer", "Android_Version", "Android_Board" (Device/OS information).

Once bug 806515 is implemented, we add the app origin (i.e. which web app the crashing process was running, the desktop and mobile web app runtime already do this), once bug 821710 is fixed, we add the URL of crashing browser tabs (desktop and mobile browsers do this but need explicit opt-in on every crash to do it).

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

This is a very tricky proposition because we don't have these centralized, and it's trivial for anyone to add new annotations. I can tell you what most of those are, but any documentation is likely to go quickly out-of-date.

In addition, the minidump has a lot of information in it, but it's in a binary black box.

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

Ted, I think what's most important there from the privacy POV that Tom brings up is that we can tell the user at least what type of information is in there and how "risky" this information is.

Comment 3

[Michelle Luna]

Hi,

Here is what we say about crash information on SUMO today:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/send-plugin-crash-reports-help-improve-firefox#w_what-information-is-sent-in-a-crash-report

"What information is sent in a crash report?

Crash reports only include technical information to help Firefox developers determine what went wrong, and how to fix it. These reports do not include personal information. The information sent in a report includes:

    what webpage you were on
    version of Firefox you were using
    your operating system
    installed plugins
    installed extensions
    and more technical info. 

This information is subject to the Firefox Privacy Policy. "

-Michelle

Comment 4

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I don't think we're sending any significantly different information to what's on desktop, so that seems fine.

Also, the Privacy Policy should cover this pretty well.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on