Firefox: “Well, this is embarrassing.”
Crashing no less than six times in the space of fifteen minutes while trying to write yesterday’s blog post about Kwok. That’s right: Firefox crashed six times! Thank goodness for WordPress’ Auto Save.
Very embarrassing. Well, for Mozilla, at least. It’s just plain annoying for me.
This isn’t the first time I have had Firefox crash repeatedly on my Mac. Last time it happened, I was using Tiger. This time, I am using Snow Leopard.
Was I doing anything unusual when the crash occurred? No. I was basically just writing in WordPress, and occasionally uploading an image (with both the standard uploader and the Flash uploader). There have been reports of Firefox crashing when using WordPress, but that was resolved as an issue with Google Gears; I don’t use Gears, so this doesn’t help me.
I have used this experience as a chance to learn about how Mozilla deals with crash reports.
If you navigate your Firefox browser to about:crashes, you will get a list of GUIDs which reference to your crashes. Click on one of them, and you will be taken to the Mozilla crash reporting website, where you can see the gruesome details about the crash. Core dumps, running threads, modules, kernel details – it’s all there.
Bundle this with Bugzilla, and Mozilla really does have a great platform for dealing with crashes and bugs. It’s a really comprehensive system they have setup to deal with the sheer volume of issues they would have. Great job! Now, can you please fix my Firefox?