Like me you are probably very annoyed when the application that you are using crashes. This usually means loosing work, or loosing data. When this happens, the system or the application usually launches a crash reporter - this will gather information and send it to the developers. With that developers will be able to try to figure out what is going wrong, or how you are using the application in a way that they don't.
But some time they can't figure it out for a lot of reasons. One thing you as a user can do to improve that is write a small comment before sending the bug report. That little comment should say what you where doing when the crash occurred. For you filling in that little box and telling us what happens is maybe 30 seconds , for us in qa, for the developers it can be a very good indication on how to reproduce the bug and thus fix it.
So next time your application crashes take the time to fill in a comment before sending the crash report.
Forcing beta users is an interesting idea - I think that at some point they would just disable the crash reporter. But Maybe adding the fact that a comment is very valuable would make more comment flow in.
How about requiring comments from people on the nightly and/or beta channel?
That would be great , but if the person is not able to reproduce the crash - the comment will be lost. If crash re-happens, the user can leave a more detailed comment.
The extra debug flags are not really available - in mozilla land, as you would need to figure out which component is responsible for the crash and turn logging for that component only.
Better idea.
If a crash happens,
(1) ask a question "please can you try to do that again, while I record some extra info?"
(2) turn debug flags on
(3) on the next bug report, submit all the extra data and turn debug flags off
(4) if no crash has happened in a couple of hours, turn debug flags off
Recording the user's mouse and keyboard input would be ideal, but that has too many security implications.
But turning the various debug options on would give developers a much greater handle on the issue.