I’ve heard it would be helpful to the Fennec Native team if they had more crash data. So I’ve written the world’s simplest random website loader. Load it up on your phone or tablet and just let it go. It loads a new random page every 10 seconds. Glance at it every 10 minutes and submit any crashes that appear, or hit “Back” if a frame-busting script broke it. You can test Fennec while doing something else! :-)
I’ve been running it on my phone and tablet for an hour and a half, and submitted 2 tablet crashes (one Flash, one in libdvm).
Of course, it may not produce a high crash volume because it doesn’t interact with the page. Ideally, it would be an add-on, so frame-busting wouldn’t affect it, it could dismiss pop-ups, follow links, crash reports would have the correct URL, and perhaps it could even auto-submit crash reports and restart itself. Suggestions for better tools to use would be most welcome.
I just installed Firefox Beta from Google Play on my Verizon Galaxy Tab 7.7. I’ll let it run for the next few hours and see what happens. =)
Turns out you do need to keep half an eye on it; a very popular domain parking page has a frame-busting script, and it’ll hit that every 5 minutes or so :-| Still, I’ve managed to find five or six crashes in one day.
I believe the Firefox Beta currently on google play is not the new Native Fennec but the old XUL-based one.
Looks like the nytimes has a frame-busting script too..
Yeah, you’re right. I just put Aurora on the tablet, we’ll see what I can find. Might put it on the Galaxy Nexus too, but I’m feeling a bit lazy tonight. ;)
First off, folks that do this should enable sending the URL together with the crash reports, requested in the platform meeting.
My runnings mostly stop on the frame buster script of one domain squatter. Would there be a way to work around that by catching domain squatters early? No idea where the list of links is coming from, so ymmv.
Not sure how that could be done; I don’t have control over the random link generator. We could try and contact its author and ask… Of course, if someone were to turn this tool into a Firefox add-on, then frame busting would not be a problem…
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