Deploying the Airbag
Have you ever crashed Firefox? We’re trying to make that as rare as possible, and we have a new tool under development to make that possible. Google and Mozilla are working in cooperation to replace the closed-source Talkback crash reporter with an open-source crash and defect reporting mechanism, called Airbag. Check it out!
I am excited about this project for several reasons:
- Developers and bug reporters can get immediate crash stack information on the client.
- Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications can combine symbol information from multiple sources, including the XULRunner runtime, application binaries, extensions, plugins, and perhaps even some system libraries.
- It will hopefully allow us to collect stack information from some kinds of runtime assertions, not just crashes.
Airbag itself is just a set of libraries that read symbolic debugging information from binaries, collect crash information on the client, and process the crash information on a server. Mozilla will be working on related projects to integrate the client and server libraries into our applications. I am hoping to have airbag included in XULRunner trunk nightlies within 8 weeks, release and collection infrastructure allowing.
September 12th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Awesome! We just enabled a pure Python problem reporting tool for Chandler, but we are still missing the cases where Python itself crashes. Hopefully we’ll be able to deplay Airbag at some point to complete the picture.
September 13th, 2006 at 12:51 am
Nice! This also means we’ll be able to use it in non-official builds, whether just someone’s personal build or some other project like flock or songbird.
Why is this licensed under the Apache Software License? Why not the MPL/GPL/LGPL trilicense, or BSD, for compatibility?
September 13th, 2006 at 4:44 am
Awesome! Great job Benjamin!
And what’s also important, it’ll make RMS happy, so he’ll stop bugging us on every FOSDEM about it ;)
September 13th, 2006 at 4:45 am
hmm.. but why is it apache license?
September 13th, 2006 at 6:14 am
I’m amazed it took this long! Props to Google for helping with this.
Also, yes, why the Apache license? What’s wrong with the MPL/LGPL/GPL trilicence?
September 13th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Very cool news! I’ve been waiting for this for quite a long time. It’s good for us, and it will be good for other FLOSS projects, too… Wooohooo!
September 15th, 2006 at 4:47 am
[…] Tra le cose interessanti che fa Airbag possiamo citare il fatto che riesca non solo ad individuare il crash ma anche a controllare e collezionare informazioni nello stack relative all’applicazione. Inoltre permette agli sviluppatori, grazie ad un server centralizzato di raccolta crash, di vedere in tempo reale i nuovi crash dovuti a fattori non noti. PUBBLICITÀ // PUBBLICITÀ postato da Fullo il venerdì 15 settembre 2006 in: […]
September 20th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Looks like it’s going to be BSD:
November 18th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
[…] ×œ× ×¢×•×“ – Henrik Gemal מדווח בבלוג שלו ×›×™ ×ª×•×›× ×” ×‘×©× Airbag, שיתוף פעולה בין ×× ×©×™ מוזילה לגוגל, תחליף ×ת הטוקבק ×”×™×©× ×” והסגורה בקוד פתוח חדש וטוב יותר. ועל ×–×” × ×מר – ×”×’×™×¢ הזמן. ב×מת ×”×’×™×¢ הזמן. חבל רק ×©×œ× ×‘×¨×•×¨ מתי המעבר ×”×–×” יתרחש. סביר ×œ×”× ×™×— ×©×œ× ×œ×¤× ×™ פיירפוקס 2. ×ולי ×œ×¤× ×™ 3? […]
January 12th, 2007 at 12:09 am
[…] Airbag is an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system that will replace Talkback as Mozilla’s crash reporting tool in Firefox 3. Ben Smedberg has talked about why this is oh-so-cool, and a lot of people are excited about replacing Talkback. […]
January 14th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Where is documentation?
February 6th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Some of it is here http://code.google.com/p/airbag/w/list Some is in code comments.
February 21st, 2007 at 2:22 am
Talkback had problems in sending back crash reports to the server if behind a proxy.. will that change with Airbag?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36545
March 29th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
[…] I’ve mentioned before, for Firefox 3 we are planning on replacing the old and crusty talkback crash reporting system with […]