Firefox Making Strides On Improved Linux Stability Thanks To Better Crash Reports

Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off.

Helping Mozilla developers improve Firefox's Linux stability can be attributed in large part to better crash report handling. One of the big specific items improving their Linux crash report handling is that they are now scraping debug information for Firefox builds and its dependencies from package repositories on Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Given that most Linux desktop users are running Firefox as packaged by their distribution rather than the official Firefox Linux binary, the scraping of the debug information from various popular Linux distributions is helping to dramatically increase the quality of their crash reports. Mozilla engineers can now analyze more than 99% of the crash reports received by Linux users where as prior to last year that number was less than 20%.

These higher quality Linux crash reports has made for more quickly diagnosing Linux-specific issues, especially around newer components like VA-API, Wayland, WebRender, and WebGPU. This data has also yielded distribution-specific regressions and other problems.

Those curious about Mozilla's work to improve the Firefox stability on Linux can read this Mozilla Hacks blog post detailing their progress on better crash reporting.