Making stuff as a founder of Avocado. Former music-maker. Tuna melt advocate. Started Google Reader. (But smarter people made it great.)

I like torturing Firefox.

Poor little browsers.

At work we often approach, and occasionally shove past, the limits of what browsers can handle. On my home laptop it appears that Firefox has crashed around 220 times and that 37 of these crashes occured in March of this year alone. I've had several different OSes and machines while at Google (including, thankfully, a new Macbook Pro as of yesterday) so the number of crashes that occur during my normal work day aren't easily retrievable, which is too bad since that'd likely be a higher total.

Mihai pointed out to me that the crash log is just a text file, so the following command with the correct username used should retrieve the number of Firefox crashes for most Macs:

grep "Command: " /Users/[your username]/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/firefox-bin.crash.log | wc -l

I'm thinking of starting an advocacy and protection group: People for the Ethical Treatment of Browsers. It would decry the inhumane level of browser testing that results in the deaths of millions of processes and threads every year. Of course, the other side (our side, really) will haughtily note good intentions, a desire to prevent further surf stoppage, and the benefits that You People enjoy thanks to the sacrifices made by software in cubicle farms all across the world.

Little-known fact: If you lean in close to your computer's speaker when a browser crashes you can hear its reedy last breath. Some say it's like a little scream.

I say it's like music. Sing!
posted at March 29, 2007, 10:15 AM

5 Comments:

  • At 9:49 AM, Blogger Amit said…

    One of these days, the Firefoxen will rise up and slay you. Do not taunt happy little firefox.

     
  • At 10:35 PM, Anonymous Nick said…

    Firefox crashes at least 3 times a day for me. I'm doing like 1000 things at a time, 128 tabs open on average. Poor Firefox :-(

     
  • At 9:23 AM, Blogger hdraper said…

    no need to pipe through wc, you can just say:

    grep -c "Command: " /Users/[username]/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/firefox-bin.crash.log

     
  • At 1:04 AM, Blogger brandon said…

    It all started here:

    about:mozilla

     
  • At 6:42 PM, Blogger josh said…

    Hi there, caught your blog via Eric Case's shared Reader stuff. Cool. Anywho, I think the crash recording/reporting parts of FF have changed significantly since this post went out - in FF 3.x you can type "about:crashes" into the browser for all submitted crash reports. Or you can go to a special place and...do something. I don't actually have any files there because FF always crashes by locking up on me these days, rather than actually crashing. (On the mac this is /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Crash Reports/ ).

     

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