QA/Talkback

What is Talkback?

Talkback is the crash reporting tool that's built-in to many Mozilla projects on the 1.8 branch. This includes Firefox 2.0.0.x, Thunderbird 2.0.0.x, and Camino 1.5.x. "Talkback" includes the Quality Feedback Agent, an application shipped within the aforementioned products, as well as the server-side Talkback reporting tool.

Related Pages on this Wiki

For more information about the following pages, please read their descriptions below.

Talkback FAQ

The Talkback FAQ is a grouping of frequently asked questions about talkback. A few of the questions were asked on the a blog post: Calling All Crashers (January 24, 2006).

Bug Days

Periodically, during our weekly Bug Days, we'll focus on crash bugs. These bugs are often reported to Bugzilla without much information beyond "I crash". The following documents are meant to help with dealing with bugs which crash.

Working With Crash Bugs
Reproducing crash bugs with the help of Talkback reports
Topcrash Analysis
Developing Crash Testcases

Crash Analysis

There are two kinds of crash analysis that we do on a regular basis: topcrash analysis and analysis of individual reports.

Our Topcrash Analysis page gives basics on where to go to look at reports, what's available, and how to log a topcrash bug. Additionally, we create various metrics based on our analysis of topcrashers and publish them here. The Metrics page has more information.

The Working With Crash Bugs page discusses how to approach crash bug and gather useful information from them. It goes into detail on appropriate methods for extracting crash logs as well as determining what might be causing the crash.

This should be moved later

How to look up your own crash incidents.
- In order to submit crash incidents, you must first have Talkback installed with your Mozilla product. That is done one of two ways (I recommend #1):
  - (1) Manually by running a custom install and checking the Quality Feedback Agent component.
  - (2) Automatically with a standard install, which will install Talkback everytime on Linux and Mac, and 20% of the time on Windows.
- Each crash submitted will have a unique Talkback Incident ID, and all of these are logged by the Talkback Client. You can see a list of your crashes by running talkback.exe in the following locations:
  - Windows - C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\extensions\talkback@mozilla.org\components
  - Linux - /firefox/extensions/talkback@mozilla.org/components/talkback/
  - Mac -
- From the Talkback Client window, you can grab any Incident ID (I know copy/paste works on Windows) and look it up with Talkback FastFind.

Talkback Infrastructure

We hope to detail information about the Talkback infrastructure here.

Talkback Archive

These pages are still useful, but we're hoping to either update them or, at the least, base Breakpad documents on them.