'It Works On My Machine': Capturing App State for Bug Reports
Why knowing the OS and browser isn't enough. How capturing sanitized LocalStorage fixes the problem.
“It works on my machine” is an old developer excuse—and a complete nightmare for QA.
When we mostly built server-rendered pages, basic environmental data like browser version, OS, and screen resolution was usually enough to reproduce a bug. Today, complex Single Page Applications built with React, Vue, or Solid rely on local state to function properly.
User agent strings aren’t enough
Knowing a user is on Chrome 124 on a Mac doesn’t explain why their dashboard failed to load. The dashboard likely failed because their specific JWT token expired, or they had an invalid flag stored in localStorage from a previous session.
To stop the “works on my machine” back-and-forth, you need to capture the application state.
Safe state extraction
FeedbackFalcon captures the state of the client’s browser, including sanitized localStorage and sessionStorage.
By automatically scrubbing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), passwords, and sensitive cookies, we give the engineer the actual state variables—like cart_items=3 or theme="dark"—that determined the application’s behavior.
When your IDE knows the local state of the client’s application, debugging is much faster.