14 DAY TRIAL // What happens when you are using an application, no matter if it is a browser, an audio player or even a game and it crashes returning you multiple errors? Of course, you're angry because you have lost your entire work since your last save. Next step? Contact the developer of the software solution to report the bug, so he can issue a patch to fix the problem. Because this is a very important process, multiple developers created several ways for communicating with their users and receiving important feedback.
Google decided to create a special platform to handle crashes in the majority of the applications that allows you to report a bug that will be available for developers with ease.
The service, entitled Airbag, is an open source project that is currently available for Windows and Mac users with support for Linux coming soon.
"Not everyone needs to know how the stack works on Intel Macs or how function calls work behind the scenes in Windows, which is why Airbag provides a simple API to catch crashes in your application and upload crash reports to a server. On the server side, we've implemented a library that can process the crash reports by matching them up with debugging symbols, so that users of a program don't need any of these symbols on their computers, and download sizes stay small.
The server library is intended to be integrated into any kind of server infrastructure - for example, you could use Apache to collect reports and store them in MySQL. We were excited to hear that the folks at Mozilla are integrating Airbag into Firefox, and hope it can help them and other open source communities continually improve the quality of their products," Brian Ryner and Mark Mentovai, Google Software Engineers said on the official blog.
If you want to test the new service provided by Google, you should follow this link and login with your Google account.