This morning, I'm told by leaf (our build magician,) that starting today all of the official Windows nightly builds have the TalkBack crash reporting utility included. If you've been waiting for Windows zips with TalkBack (I know a few of you have been avoiding the installer builds) or you've got a crash that can't be reproduced with 1.7 beta, the nightly builds await you -- get 'em while they're hot. The zip builds aren't yet configured just right so after initial launch, you have to shut down, delete the compreg.dat file, and restart to get TalkBack to register. After that initial registration, it should work fine. Hopefully we'll have a fix for that soon.
TalkBack, for those of you who don't know, is a small utility that ships with Mozilla (and Linux Firefox -- more builds to come,) that will send a reports of most Mozilla crashes, along with a stacktrace of the crash, to a Mozilla Foundation server where a team of permissioned QA folks can view them individually and in aggregate to identify the "top crashers" and get bugs filed on the most high-profile stability problems in Mozilla.
In addition to generating, deciphering, and converting the aggregate data into bug reports, which is limited to just a few people right now, we can all use TalkBack when we file crashing bug reports that need stack traces. Before filing your crashing bug report, be sure to send in the TalkBack crash data. When filing a crashing bug, note in the bug the specific steps required to trigger the crash and add to your initial comment the ID of the TalkBack report you submitted. You can get this ID by running the TalkBack executable located in your install directory. The ID looks something like TB9501L. If you have permissions to do so, also add the keyword "talkbackid" to the bug and one of the people with access to the TalkBack reports will pull that stack trace and attach it to the bug report.
I'm hopeful that it won't be long before users can look up their own crash reports to save duplicate bug reporting and remove the bottleneck for reporting new crashers that include stack traces. Getting TalkBack into the rest of the builds and working properly is the first priority, though. If you have any questions about TalkBack, you can ask in the comments.
