Updates

Our latest DevTools improvement allows you to draw your colleague’s attention to a specific console log (you can already do it with network logs by the way).You just need to highlight the log, copy the link and send it to your colleague. When they open the link, the page will auto-scroll to the highlighted part. It’s rather convenient when you need someone’s input to solve the issue.

Help your users report bugs easily and supplement your customer support flows by connecting Bird SDK to Zendesk and Intercom.

This is how easy it works: once your customers or end-users encounter an issue, they can simply click on the Bird icon, which will auto-create a Bird session. This automatically opens the Intercom or Zendesk chat room with your customer support team, which will contain a Bird link and allow your support agents to respond to the user right away.

Through user interviews, we have uncovered requests for better ways to manage and search through sessions. With this in mind, we have improved our existing labels feature and added the ability to filter views in your session list. 

Filtering allows you to customize the search results. You can, for example, hide certain sessions, e.g. those with a Done status.

You can now add screenshots and Replays to SDK. This means that your users will have more options to report bugs to you. This is especially useful if you use Bird SDK alongside Intercom or Zendesk - this way, customer support can know exactly what the user did prior to reporting an issue.

This release also contains miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements for use cases reported by users around SDK customization.

Adding Replays to SDK

This feature is disabled by default. When enabled, clicking the trigger button immediately opens the session preview with interactions from the last 2 minutes — saving users time from having to reproduce issues.

See how to enable Replays in the SDK here.

We're excited to announce a big update to our Linear integration(s). We've gained some important learnings about workflow issues based on your feedback, and with these updates, we’ve improved what happens after a bug is reported, and how we can make it easier for developers to get involved.‍

Auto-create Linear issues depending on Collection

‍When a session is uploaded to a specific Collection, you can automatically create a Linear issue in a specific Linear team customized with a default project, labels, priorities, etc. This allows you to automatically triage tickets to the right engineering teams, purely based on where you upload your bug report! To make it even smarter, you can integrate our web SDK with different public app IDs in different parts of your apps. This means that when your customers report a bug via the web SDK, a Linear issue can be created for the relevant engineering team instantly.

Improved manual Linear integration

With this new update, you can now create new or add to existing Linear tickets without leaving Bird.

• Before: you would be redirected to the Linear app from a Bird session to create a new Linear issue.
• Now: you can click on the Linear icon in a Bird session and fill out the custom fields for that specific session to be uploaded directly to your Linear workspace.

This Linear personal integration update means that you won’t need to switch between applications, saving you even more time. Following this update, Linear personal integrations have been automatically turned off. So if you were using the integration previously, please head over to your Integrations Settings page and reconnect it.

Slack integration per Collection
This is a huge improvement on our Slack integration. Previously you can only connect Bird to one Slack channel, but this wasn’t ideal since you get a messy feed of internal bug reports, tests and bugs reported by end users via our Web SDK. With today’s release, you can now configure Slack notifications when bugs are uploaded to specific collections. For example, you can now create a Support collection in Bird where all end user bug reports from the SDK end up, and set this to automatically notify your Slack #support channel - thus making sure bugs easier to find and never missed.

Keystroke logging
You can now log keystroke inputs when recording your screen or for Replays using the Bird extension or Web SDK. The keystroke inputs can be sound in the console tab in our dev tools, and also automatically added to our E2E helper templates to give you an even better head start in creating E2E tests from Bird sessions.

Customize label colors
Adding colors to labels is a great way to visually organize your Bird sessions. You can apply custom colors by going to your Settings page.

Replays trimming

Replays trimming enables you to select focus start and end points directly on a local session and then upload it. Using our soft-trimming feature, you can highlight the good part of your Replays (like a timestamped comment), while still having access to unfocused parts and logs after the session is uploaded (in case it includes something important for the engineers to debug).

Premium trials

Are you using the free version of Bird but curious to see what our other plans are all about? You can now access our Premium plan features for 14 days for free. Read more about our premium trials here.

Annual plans

With our annual plans, you’ll get even better value by saving 20%, available for all our paid plans. Annual plans renew automatically, with a single advance payment billed every 12 months. You can visit our pricing page for more info.

Random bug titles on your bug reports aren't your thing? Workspaces now come with these pre-defined options instead:

• Random (e.g., “Yellow Fire Ant”)
• Contents and page title (e.g., "#36 Replay at Episode 1: What is the perfect bug report like?")
• Contents and URL path (e.g., "#36 Replay at /podcast/episode-1-what-is-the-perfect-bug-report-like")

This new feature improves the session list experience as it hints at what the bug report might be about and provides an easy way to refer to it when talking to others. Workspace admins can select this by heading to their Workspace >> General settings.

Another exciting release feature this week: console support for React components. Bird now captures React components logged to the console and allows developers to inspect Class components, Functional components, props, children and more! Be ready to spot objects on our console marked with the React logo.

When recording a session using the Bird extension, you can control your recording with our handy keyboard shortcuts.

Simply copy and paste this URL chrome://extensions/shortcuts to your browser to open the settings page.

Learn how to use Bird’s keyboard shortcuts here and give it a try today!

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Work more efficiently with your team and have a better workflow by using Bird.

Send your next bug report straight to your team's Azure DevOps board directly from Bird Eats Bug, saving you time to switch between apps while ensuring your bugs get fixed.

You can also provide more info to your team by adding your bug report as a comment to an existing Azure issue.

Another exciting feature release this week: link unfurling.

When you share a Bird public bug report link in apps like Slack, Notion, or LinkedIn, additional context about the link (e.g., session title, description, and screenshots) is auto-appended to the message and displayed immediately, adding continuity to conversations.

Note: link unfurling only works for public bug reports (since private bug reports are... well, private.)

We've gathered a lot of feedback from user interviews, our community, and analytics and made some essential refinements to our extension. We refreshed our design, making our instant replay feature easier to understand and use.

This new update also makes it simpler for new users to get started with Bird and progressively discover its various capabilities as they report more bugs.

Today’s release adds the ability to create collections to organize your sessions.

This is especially useful for people who use Bird beyond just bug reporting. Here’s an example: You can create a collection called Bugs where you store all your bug reports, and a collection called Demos, which houses explanation videos for your remote team members or even end users. Collections can be also used to group recordings by sprint. You can rename, archive, and delete Collections to further personalize your Bird workspace.

What's more annoying than a bug? Being disrupted with a notification while you are mid-recording a perfect bug report!

For such situations, you can now pause a recording, go tend to these disruptions, and resume recording to finish up your perfect bug report - and continue keeping all your engineers happy about fixing bugs.

Bug Watch, instant replay, DOM recording, Generate bug report...(yes, we’re working on this feature-naming-gate). In any case, our goal has always been to make bug reporting faster and richer. We’ve received some incredible feedback on our Bug Watch feature since its release at the start of the year and have been fine-tuning it’s performance. The latest improvement is a bit more outward facing though. If you have Bug Watch enabled on your page, the extension will now display a button that generates a bug report instantly. Give it a try, or hide it if you prefer - whatever floats your bug reporting boat.

We love hearing about all the various apps that you want Bird to integrate with, and we’d love to integrate with all of them even more. It’s tricky to deliver integrations fast enough though with our current team size (and without giving up on a lot of the other exciting developments in the works). So today, we launch our integration with Zapier, allowing you to connect Bird up with most of the apps you can think of!

We’ve been busy this month making a bunch of fixes and performance improvements behind the scenes to make Bird run as smooth as egg yolks, while a lot more secure than egg shells.

As promised in a previous post, we’ve also released mentions so that you can now tag other team members while making a comment in your bug reports, and Bird will automatically notify them to take a closer look.

We often hear from some users requiring multiple workspaces to manage bugs from different clients or projects. Now you can create additional workspaces from the workspace menu in the top left of the home screen. Want to delete a workspace? Just pop over to the settings for said workspace and delete it.

On that note, we’ve also made some improvements to our settings flow so that you only see the settings for the workspace you are currently active on. This helps to make our settings more focused, avoid confusion and allows us to scale our settings page as we continue to add more exciting new features!

Rich text functionalities have just been added to our description and comment editors. Now you can insert links, make text bold and more to describe your bugs with more structure. This is just the first step, and we will add the ability to @mention your team or highlight specific times in the videos or logs in the near future.

We’ve also fixed a bug that prevented some of our users from being able to upload their recordings, and the fix will make it faster for us to debug such issues in the future.

We’ve made it easier to debug network related issues by syncing them with our videos and providing a timestamp. So now when you try to fix a bug, you’ll be able to dig into all the network requests made at the exact point where the bug occurs.

This week, comments land in our bug reports. Now you can discuss a bug with your team to get it fixed faster and receive an email notification whenever someone comments on one of your bugs. This is just the first step for our comments feature, we plan to continue improving it with things like tagging team members and commenting on technical logs.

Alongside this, we’ve been addressing a number of bug fixes, and also working on integrating Bird with Zapier.

Happy New Year!

December is always a quiet month as our team hibernates from the cold European winters. However, this didn’t stop us from still shipping some goodies just in time for Christmas! (Because we’re sure everyone is eager to report bugs over Christmas...). The most notable of these was adding an instant replay functionality to our Bug Watch feature!

Currently released in Beta, if you have Bug Watch enabled on a page, the next time a bug occurs, just replay the bug and share it instantly - there’s no need to record and reproduce the bug anymore. We’re super excited by this release, and can’t wait to hear how it helps your bug reporting workflow. This isn’t all we’ve been up to though:

• We’ve enhanced our share button so that it’s more clear when a session is private or public
• Our extension settings now allow you to toggle the data that Bird records
• Improved placement and styling of alerts to make them more clear
• Improved the explanation of our plan user roles
• Improved our session search functionality
• We launched a great deal on AppSumo
• Optimised how network data is rendered to reduce freezes when opening the network pane in sessions with a lot of network requests
• Improvements to auto-join e.g. not enabling for generic email domains like Gmail
• A bunch of bug fixes so that they don’t creep up on us during the holidays
• Most importantly, we’ve been alerted of a typo in our random session bug names and have renamed praying mantids to praying mantis

Upcoming:

• Bird sessions will soon have comments
• We are working to support more browsers with Bird

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Since we made private workspaces available on all plans, we've received more support requests around team members not being able to access private sessions. So we've been working on ways to improve session sharing and invites.

Auto-join is one such improvement that makes it effortless to keep your sessions private, while allowing your team to easily access what they need; no more "I don't have permission to access" requests. By adding a trusted email domain (usually your work email), you can share your private sessions with anyone with this valid email domain and they will automatically have access to the session and join your workspace. More details about this feature can be found here.

Behind the scenes, we also have a bunch of exciting things under development that we look forward to sharing soon:

• Our instant replay feature is currently in Alpha and will soon be released to Beta for everyone to try, we can't wait for this release.
• We will also be launching Bird on Appsumo, so if you use this service, keep watch for an excellent deal with Bird.

Earlier this year, we introduced a feature to help you organize your sessions with “To do”, “In progress”, and “Done” labels.

Today, to make this feature even more useful for you and your team, we are launching Custom Session Labels.

You can now create, edit, and apply your own labels to any session in your workspace. You can also edit existing labels or remove ones you don’t need — all changes are automatically reflected for your whole team. Give it a try, under Settings > Workspace.

More of our freshly hatched features:

• All new sessions are now uploaded in MP4 format: You can download the video in MP4 format for easier re-sharing in other tools. This update also means that Bird sessions are now fully supported in Safari.

• We've optimised how we load session data, so the session list doesn't freeze, even when you have thousands of sessions.
• The extension can now record application windows in addition to tabs or the whole screen.
• We've improved our onboarding to make it easier for new users better navigate after sign up, more easily report their first bug and a more helpful empty session list state.
• Improvements to Network requests to display the response body more reliably.
• Unlimited sessions can be reported on the free plan. Older sessions are automatically locked.

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Hope you've enjoyed some vacation time this summer. To make returning to work easier, we have an upgraded extension waiting for you!

The goal of Bird has always been to make reporting bugs as fast and easy as possible. So we've listened to user feedback, and have made some fundamental changes to the user experience and performance.

We can't wait for everyone to try the new extension, here's all the changes we've made:

• Bird can be used on any page without the extra "enable" step. Just click Bird and record.
• All recording actions are now a single click away, no more hidden menu's and switching between tab or full screen.
• Introducing Bug Watch - Bird will continuously capture logs and look for errors on the pages you want it to. This might include your beta/staging environment or pages you test regularly. Click here to learn more.
• Technical logs are now better in-sync with screen recordings. When you switch tabs during a full screen recording, Bird now also switches where it captures the logs from.
• We've made fundamental performance changes that aim to minimise the extension crashing and reduce long term memory consumption.

Like the updated extension? Don't like it? We'd love to get your feedback. Throw us your suggestions in our Slack community, by email, directly on Kampsite, or schedule a feedback call with our designer.

We've just made a big update to our free and paid plans:

Free plan changes

• Share team workspace, invite your team and report bugs to a shared space.
• Share bug reports privately.
• Invite admins and bug reporters (who can only upload bugs to your workspace with limited privileges for accessing other settings and workspace content).

Paid plan changes:

• We previously had multiple plans for different groups of users. We've simplified them into a single plan priced at $8 per user (the Business plan). With Business, you get more user management options. You'll get access to an additional user role called a "Member" on top of to the admin and bug reporter role in the free plan. You also can add unlimited bug reports and unlimited bug reporters for free on your paid plan.

While we are incubating bigger changes, we have been polishing rough edges. In no particular order we introduce:

• You can attach Bird sessions to existing Jira tickets. And creating tickets in Jira is more reliable.
• Search the session list by integration and status. Try out by typing Jira or Open.
• Finally it is possible to play back session video recordings on Safari on MacOS 11.4 or higher.
• Download annotated screenshots with one click by hovering over a screenshot.
• The session details update live in your tab as other team members change attributes like the session title, description, or integration status.
• We made it more explicit that in the session view the DevTools can be hidden by adding a maximize button when hovering over a screenshot.
• Click events are displayed in a more readable fashion in the session console pane.
• The session console auto-scrolls smoother during session video playback.

We are pleased to share our freshly hatched features.

• Annotate screenshots with arrows, rectangles, text, and free form pencil drawings in the extension and web app.
• Smoother session upload: The upload button now includes a workspace selector so that you never forget to select the right one before uploading a session. Even if you still do, you can now move sessions to the right workspace from the sessions list. When you click "Upload", Bird copies the session link immediately, so that you can already use it while the session finishes uploading. We fixed an annoying case where the extension would prompt you to login before uploading even when you already were logged in.
• One-click session sharing: All integrations and sharing options you enable on the refreshed integrations settings page are pinned to the session detail view header. One less click to share bugs!
• Streamlined session view: Besides the improved session sharing, the new two column layouts gives more space to the most used information. The system information is placed with the other technical information in the dev tools panel. The dev tools can be collapsed for an even more focused view. Console events show more relevant information at a glance, because duplicated events are grouped with a counter.
• Light-weight bug triaging with session status: Mark sessions as To do, In progress, or Done from the session detail view header or the sessions list. This new feature is available on all plans with integrations.
• More small improvements. For instance, you can now connect a different Jira account for every workspace you are a member of. Or, to continue the theme of streamlining, users with bug reporter role see only settings relevant to their role.

Launched

• New GitHub integration - enable it in the workspace integrations settings. The GitHub integration enables you to create GitHub issues in your organization's repositories with two clicks. Bird also shows the current GitHub issue status.
• Session list improvements: You can now search and sort sessions. Any session in the list shows linked Jira tickets and GitHub issues, so that you can directly jump to them.
• Combined session title and description: much easier to leave both a title and a description (just press tab).
• Fixed the webcam preview vanishing issue when navigating during a session recording.

What we're working on:

• An all-new extension UI.
• A more efficient session detail view with improved session sharing

It's been a while since our last update, but we've been hard at work in shipping new features and improvements that make catching, reporting and fixing bugs better than ever. Check out what's new:

Launched

• New slack integration - enable it in the workspace integrations settings. The slack integration posts a message whenever a new session is uploaded. It also gives richer bird link previews in Slack.
• Added email upload notifications - enable it in the general workspace settings. Receive an email whenever another team member uploads a session to bird.
• You can now bulk-delete sessions in the sessions list.
• Added ability to hide the dev tools in session details. Press x in the top right to hide console and network requests. This is useful to share daily updates, design briefs, or other recordings which are not focused on bugs.
• Improved onboarding: We're asking you, our new users, for more details to improve the product. The session list gives more contextual hints how to install the extension.
• Performance: Sessions with many console events now show up quicker. Title, description, screenshot, video, and system information are shown immediately while the console events are loading.
• Polishing: Added loading spinners to indicate ongoing operations in more cases, and added secondary actions like the logout buttons to most views. We're also adding more tooltips where appropriate to aid usability.
• Bug fixes. The Jira issue creation form shows helpful form validation errors in more cases. As always, we've also been working on making the extension more stable and performant.

Coming soon

• Further improvements to managing sessions:
• see which sessions have integration issues created
• search sessions
• sort sessions
• GitHub integration

If you've enjoyed using the Bird for it's recording of console data, the bug reports just got better with the recording of network activity too! Now you can inspect the Network requests for the session and dig deeper into details such as headers and responses. We've also made some general usability improvements to the sessions, such as: putting all workspace and user navigations in one place on the top left, made the Jira integration modal a sidebar so that you can fill in a bug while looking at the session details, as well as making it more clear when you are viewing a session that belongs to you vs. somebody else's session.

Improvements and fixes

• Introduce Network request recording.
• Bug fix for the display of click events
• Bug fix for workspace invitations
• Update to only allow admins to change user roles
• Smooth upgrading and downgrading between plans
• Session descriptions are now easier to fill in
• Session titles and descriptions no longer disappear if you reload a local session
• Dismissible install extension button
• Privacy quick toggle
• Updated onboarding page after installing the Bird extension
• Security improvements

Upcoming

• We're now working on some improvements to our user onboarding flow

We've released team workspaces so you can now invite your teammates and report bugs to one place, a new team plan, private sharing, new integrations and displaying more types of data in our console. As with any big releases there was plenty of testing and QA beforehand, so it was great to use Bird internally for debugging Bird!

Improvements and fixes

• Introduce workspaces.
• Member invites and admin controls.
• Updated plan options.
• Added new integrations for Linear.app and Trello.
• Update console to support console.assert() logs.
• Update console to record and display click events.
• Fixed a UI bug with how our selectors appear on Windows.

Upcoming

• We're now working on capturing and displaying Network activity in Bird.

We're really excited to have started working on support for teams and workspaces, this has been an essential feature which we're excited to get started on. Why does it matter? It will enable a bunch of useful new features in the future like being able to share sessions privately and more securely, having all of your teams bugs stored in one place etc. can't wait to share this when it's done. In the meantime, we've continued making other improvements and fixes where we can.

Other improvements and fixes

• We've improved our Jira integration to now support custom fields when creating an issue
• Our console now shows the url that the session started on
• Our console now supports Vue objects
• Security improvements to uploaded sessions and sessions shared to Jira Cloud
• Performance improvements to make the app run more smoothly
• User experience improvements such as additional loading states and support views for certain error states in the app and extension

The console is an essential component for fixing bugs, and this month we've made it better. Not only have we optimised how we handle large javascript objects, we've also improved how HTML objects are rendered.

Other improvements and fixes

• We've made an important change in how we record object data in our console to make Bird more efficient. As sometimes, certain javascript objects can be so large that they cause Bird to stop working.
• We improved how the extension handles multiple local session tabs, so it is now possible to record a bunch of bugs in one go, and upload them when you're done testing.
• Google Chrome's recent update has allowed us to improve our apps focus styles, making Bird more friendly for keyboard oriented users.
• We've fixed a bug in our authentication which was causing our users to be logged out within a week of loggin in. Now users can stay logged in and use Bird for longer.
• We've implemented some improvements to our Jira integration based on user feedback.
• The UI colours have also been given a facelift to improve contrast.
• Performance improvements to make Bird run more smoothly

After launching Jira (and dealing with a host of bugs), we've turned our heads inwards to make a bunch of much needed usability and infrastructure improvements throughout the app. We've also added a feedback modal within the app to make it easier for you to reach us if you ever encounter a problem, want to give us some feedback, or just to say hello.

Other improvements and fixes

• We've added a new settings page (replacing the sidebar)
• We now show the % progress when uploading bigger sessions
• Improvements to description input form
• We fixed an issue preventing users from opening sessions in 2 separate tabs
• Bug fixes and improvements to Jira integration
• UX improvements to our overlays and modals
• Improvements to the logs we show in the console
• We've upgraded our authentication service so that users stay logged in for longer
• Fixed bug which stopped the cam recording from working
• Many UI improvements
• Many performance improvements

After launching Jira (and dealing with a host of bugs), we've turned our heads inwards to make a bunch of much needed usability and infrastructure improvements throughout the app. We've also added a feedback modal within the app to make it easier for you to reach us if you ever encounter a problem, want to give us some feedback, or just to say hello.

Other improvements and fixes

• We've introduced our first version of paid plans
• Added notifications for any errors in Bird to help us better support you in fixing bugs
• Revamped our landing page
• Performance improvements
• Bug fixes

Reporting a bug on Bird just got easier. With our latest update you can now add a voice-overs to your reports with your microphone, enable your webcam to make sessions more personal, or share a screenshot for more visual bugs.

Upcoming

• We're working on a new professional tier of Bird, which will feature more ways to report bugs, the first of which will be integration with Jira Cloud.