Is this informative?
To some people, maybe. But consider the <HUNDREDS> if not <THOUSANDS> of support calls that probably went like this:
Tech: Technical support, can I help you?
Customer: Shh, be quiet! I think the feds are onto me!
Tech: Excuse me?
Customer: you don't know? My computer did something!
Tech: Alright... what happened?
Customer: Well... I'm not sure, but I don't want to go to jail!
Tech: Sir, I assure you, people aren't sent to jail because they have problems with their computers
Customer: Did you know they do things that are ILLEGAL? That's what it said! "This program has performed an
illegal operation and will be shut down! I hope the government doesn't think <I> told the program to do that! I didn't! I'm an innocent bystander!
And of course, we have the easily readable error from windows NT:
This basically says, "the program crashed. Here's some useless gibberish"
Windows XP... well, it's a little better...
OF course I can only guess at the number of totally redundant Error reports that the MS servers get.
The win7 one seems a lot more informative.
Of course, you're talking about firefox (and other applications of that nature)... I imagine you're referring (for example) to functionality like the automatic tab restoration, whereby starting FF after a crash shows the "Well, This is embarassing" or something similar error.
Consider the program state. It just started. (I don't know how FF keeps track of dirty shut downs) but lets say, all it knows is it didn't shut down properly.
It doesn't know why. In fact, It cannot know why- it crashed- there was no chance to save even what the error code was. (well, technically they could install a global error handler or something, but that has other connotations that would mess it up even worse). All it knows is it had those tabs open, and can open them. the prompt is displayed, because for all FF knows, the crash was caused by one of the pages or a plugin or other item on one of those tabs.
If Firefox crashes, however, you can get the very same information as you would for any other application crash; (for example, the various "Details" or "View what this report contains" items on all the above (except NT4) can be used to view this information.
Note that it might be that the use of the error reporting dialogs are disabled- this was the case for my XP VM for some reason. I could double-click "crasher.exe" until I was blue in the face, but it didn't do anything. and I was trying to crash, I mean, seriously, copying 16MB to a null address cannot possibly succeed!
