Right now we have a lot of code that looks like this: ProcessHandle handle; if (!base::OpenProcessHandle(aOtherProcess, &handle)) { // XXX need to kill |aOtherProcess|, it's boned return nullptr; } DebugOnly<bool> ok = parent->Open(aTransport, handle, XRE_GetIOMessageLoop(), mozilla::ipc::ParentSide); MOZ_ASSERT(ok); (The same "it's boned" comment already appears in three places in Gecko and bug 641685 will add a fourth.) We should really do a better job here. I'm not sure what scenarios these calls could fail in. We should either crash or handle the error gracefully.