{"id":73,"date":"2011-06-14T08:28:50","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T13:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/?p=73"},"modified":"2011-06-14T08:28:50","modified_gmt":"2011-06-14T13:28:50","slug":"why-its-hard-to-ship-non-crashy-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/2011\/06\/14\/why-its-hard-to-ship-non-crashy-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Why it’s hard to ship non-crashy software"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was just looking at some data<\/a> produced from our crash reporting system<\/a>, and I continue to be amazed at the amount of third-party code that gets loaded into Firefox on Windows. That data file contains a list of all unique binary files (EXE or DLL) that were listed in Windows crash reports in a single day. A quick look at it shows:<\/p>\n

$ cut -f1 -d, 20110613-modulelist.txt\u00a0 | sort -u | wc -l
\n10385<\/p>\n

There are over 10,000 unique filenames in a single day’s worth of crash reports. That sure seems like a lot! Now, certainly, a lot of these modules look like they’ve been randomly named, which probably indicates that they’re some kind of virus (like 0eYZf0QFDSGEAbTRWD3F.dll<\/em>, for example), so those are likely to inflate the number. There’s a bug on file<\/a> asking that we collect MD5 hashes of every DLL in our crash reports so we could more easily detect malware\/virus DLLs that use these tactics, as well as integrate with lists of known malware and viruses from antivirus vendors.<\/p>\n

In the past, we have had problems with plugins<\/a> and extensions<\/a> causing crashes for many Firefox users. We have ways of mitigating those through blacklisting<\/a>. We can also blacklist specific DLLs<\/a> from loading in the Firefox process, which is not used as often because it’s harder to get right and provides little feedback to users about what’s been disabled. However, given the sheer number of possible things that can be loaded in our process, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to block all software that causes crashes for users. This is unfortunate, because any one of these pieces of software can cause a crash in Firefox, and all the user sees is “Firefox crashed<\/a>“. I suppose we now know how Microsoft feels when users blame Windows for crashes caused by faulty drivers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was just looking at some data produced from our crash reporting system, and I continue to be amazed at the amount of third-party code that gets loaded into Firefox on Windows. That data file contains a list of all unique binary files (EXE or DLL) that were listed in Windows crash reports in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2020,4562],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}