842209 - Provide a way for portable Firefox to override the crashreporter directory

Status: REOPENED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect, P5)

Description

[Firefox Portable user]

TL;DR: The problem is that the path for crash reports seems to be hardcoded and can't be overrided.

I use Firefox Portable (from portableapps.com) and there is an issue, that whenever Crash Reporter works out - it saves it's data somewhere into %AppData% folder, which goes a bit against the ideology of a portable software (in my opinion).

The problem is that the path for crash reports seems to be hardcoded and can't be overrided.
I used Process Explorer and found out that process 'firefox.exe' has an environment called MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DATA_DIRECTORY which points to the '%AppData%\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Crash Reports' folder.
John T. Haller, the author of portable container for Firefox made firefoxportable.exe try to override that environment's value to some other path, so now Process Explorer shows that process firefoxportable.exe has a new environment MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DATA_DIRECTORY with new correct value, but firefox.exe process doesn't inherit it.

Usually firefox.exe inherits values for environments from it's parental process firefoxportable.exe, but it doesn't do the same for MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DATA_DIRECTORY.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DATA_DIRECTORY is a write-only variable which Firefox writes and the crashreporter app reads. I'm morphing this bug to solve your actual problem.

This directory comes from http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/0a91da5f5eab/toolkit/xre/nsAppRunner.cpp#l3040 which eventually comes from http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/e7632ab657e5/toolkit/xre/nsXREDirProvider.cpp#l1062

It might make sense to support changing the whole "userroot" via the environment. As it stands, though, it's unlikely that Ted or I will ever prioritize this request, so you'll probably need to find somebody to write the patch.

Comment 2

[Firefox Portable user]

Just FYI: due to crashreporter's bugs and exactly this one in particular, John T. Haller, the developer of portable shell for Firefox took decision to switch off crash reporter completely. So your telemetry data may probably miss some significant info.
I support John's decision, since anyways you are not going to fix this bug during at least the following decade.

Comment 3

[Loic]

Keep the bug open.

Comment 4

[Igor]

Hi,

I have the same problem. It is unexpected for example, if you go to about:crashes and click "Remove all reports" in a *portable* browser, that this will delete files not within your portable browser.