Firefox’s crash reporter is hopefully not something that most users experience often. However, it is still a very important component of Firefox, as it is integral in providing insight into the most visible bugs: those which crash the main process. These bugs offer the worst user experience (since the entire application must close), so fixing them is a very high priority. Other types of crashes, such as content (tab) crashes, can be handled by the browser and reported gracefully, sometimes without the user being aware that an issue occurred at all. But when the main browser process comes to a halt, we need another separate application to gather information about the crash and interact with the user.

This post details the approach we have taken to rewrite the crash reporter in Rust.…