Analyzing crash data of Firefox

If Firefox crashes whilst under automation, it’s helpful to retrieve the generated crash data aka minidump files, and report these to us.

Retrieve the crash data

Since geckodriver creates a temporary user profile for Firefox, it automatically removes all associated folders once the tests complete. As a result, any minidump files generated during a crash are also deleted.

To preserve these files, set the MINIDUMP_SAVE_PATH environment variable to an existing folder and pass it into geckodriver:

MINIDUMP_SAVE_PATH="~/.geckodriver/minidumps" geckodriver

For each detected Firefox crash, two files will be stored in the specified folder:

  • .dmp file – Contains the actual crash data.

  • .extra file – Includes details about the running Firefox instance.

Both files are essential for further analysis and should be attached to a GitHub issue for investigation.

Getting details of the crash

More advanced users can upload the generated minidump files themselves and receive details information about the crash. Therefore find the crash reporter folder and copy all the generated minidump files into the pending sub directory. Make sure that both the .dmp and .extra files are present.

Once done you can also view the crash reports.

If you submitted a crash please do not forget to also add the link of the crash report to the geckodriver issue.

Enabling the crash reporter

Deprecation warning: --enable-crash-reporter argument is deprecated and planned to be removed with the 0.37.0 release of geckodriver. As such it shouldn’t be used with version 0.36.0 or later anymore. Please use the solution described above.

By default geckodriver disables the crash reporter so it doesn’t submit crash reports to Mozilla’s crash reporting system, and also doesn’t interfere with testing.

This behaviour can be overridden by using the command line argument --enable-crash-reporter. You can view the crash reports and share it with us after submission.

Important: Please only enable the crash reporter if the above mentioned solution does not work.