iCab just quit unexpectedly. What's going on?

Simply put a crash happens when a program is asked to deal with an unforeseen situation. Thus, when someone discovers a way to reproduce a crash and informs the authors, they can make sure the next version of the program knows about the situation, thus turning it into a foreseen situation, meaning it won't crash anymore.

-- Sander Tekelenburg

When iCab just quits unexpectedly, you've stumbled upon a bug in iCab causing it to crash (i. e. the developers of iCab made some kind of mistake). Unfortunately, things like this do happen sometimes with computers. In the past, it frequently happened that bugs like this locked up the entire computer, forcing a complete restart of the system; nowadays, most modern operating systems (OSs) are engineered differently, so that doesn't usually happen anymore.

iCab crashes should always be reported directly to Alexander Clauss via email to support@icab.de (see iCab Support). If possible, include the following information in your bug report:

• A description of what happened,
• where it happened (i. e. the web page's URL address),
• what you were doing at the time the bug occured (e. g. while loading the page, clicked on this-or-that etc.),
• which version of iCab you use,
• which operating system version you use,
• whether or not the bug is reproducible if you do the same thing you've described above once again and
• (important) either a crash-dump or a StdLog!

Crash-dumps and StdLogs are a few screenfuls of technobabble telling the developer exactly in which part of the application the bug occurred and other data, thus enabling the developer to easily identify and fix the bug in many cases.

Crash-dump (Mac OS X)

All crash-dumps are saved in the folder ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter (~ means inside your user home folder). Just grab the file with the name iCab.crash.log and attach it to your bug report email (i. e. click, drag-and-drop it onto the window you've written the email in.

Please delete the file iCab.crash.log by moving it to the Trash after you've sent the email because those crash-dump logs are never deleted by the computer; if you don't delete them manually, they can get quite large and thus not only slow (and expensive) to transmit via email, but also hard to read for the developer.

-- ArneJohannessen

StdLog (System 7 to Mac OS 9)

Crash logs can be created in Mac OS 9 and earlier using Apple's MacsBug debugger. When a program crashes with MacsBug installed, you are immediately dropped into MacsBug - the screen turns grey and a large white panel appears full of scary-looking information. A message appears in the central console area in red detailing the crash, for example Unhandled PPC exception at <some address in memory>.

To have MacsBug record a crash log at this point, type in stdlog at the MacsBug prompt and press return. MacsBug will spend some time recording a sizeable amount of data about the machine, including open files, extensions, what iCab was doing when it crashed, and so forth. The drive will grind for a while and lots of text will scroll up the screen. All this data will be written into a file on your desktop called (I think) stdlog. This is the file that you can mail to Alex Clauss.

Once MacsBug is done, you have to instruct it to shut iCab down, with the command es ("Exit to shell"). Mac OS will -- hopefully -- close iCab and the standard Finder "unexpectedly quit" message will appear.

Note that just as with Mac OS X crash reports, every time you record a stdlog, it is appended to the existing file, so once you have e-mailed the file to Alexander, toss it in the Trash or put it someplace else.

Also, please note that the data stored in the stdlog file contains sensitive information such as a list of every file open on your machine at the time. You may wish to review the contents of the log file if you have anything installed or running or open that you do not wish to be passed on to a third party such as a software developer.

Finally, if you want to simply get rid of a crashed program without writing a log, just type es (and press return) and the program will be closed. If repeated attempts to use es produce more and more errors, then your Macintosh has completely crashed and your only option here is to type rb for reboot. Had MacsBug not been installed, the machine would have frozen and the mouse cursor either seized up or vanished altogether.

-- DanielBeardsmore - 10 Nov 2004