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Replay’s Recording Roadmap

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Jason Laster
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Tesla Model 3
We often talk about how we replay because that is where time-travel debugging happens, but it is just as exciting to think about how we record.
Videos have not changed that much in the past twenty years, but the availability of video recorders have. The iPhone put a video recorder in everyone’s hands. The Tesla Model 3 meant every accident was recorded. NBA instant replay changed the way the game was officiated.
Replay’s recording roadmap looks similar.

1. Democratized Recorder

If the Replay browser were based off of Chrome, it could be your default browser and the record button could be one click away. If you see an issue, you could click record, reproduce the bug, and share the replay with your team.

2. Always On Recorder

If you could click save whenever you see an issue, you would never have to worry about reproducing a bug. You could save the replay and share it with your team.
An always-on recorder also enables recording production environments such as Node backends and Electron frontends. At that point crash reports would include links to replay sessions!

3. Instant Replay

If replaying were instant, you could add a print statement in your editor and see the last 100 logs immediately in your editor’s console. The direct feedback would change local development.

Our Roadmap

In Q2, we will be focusing on recording end-to-end test in CI and ten minute recordings. This summer, we will develop the Chrome for Mac browser and begin exploring an always-on recording mode.
Related posts
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In this post we develop the ideas underlying Replay’s upcoming Performance Analysis, using a real world regression drawn from the development of our devtools.
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What exactly is time travel? How do we ensure we can reliably record and deterministically replay any website?
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