[UPDATE] Will Mozilla leave Firefox 3 bugs unbusted?
Posted by Peng on 16 November 2007
(Updated to include an article I found by Mozilla’s Mike Shaver. – Peng)
There have been a number of articles floating through cyberspace claiming that that Mozilla devs will leave over 700 Firefox 3 bugs unfixed when it ships since they’re already quite behind schedule. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler has a very plainspoken response to them.
It seems the articles all seem to stem from an article by Grezg Keizer at Computerworld that has been picked up by practically everyone and their grandmother. Asa’a response?
That claim is simply horseshit. We’ve already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we’re discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues we wanted to get fixed for Firefox 3.
I’ve been helping test Firefox 3 for a few weeks now, and I must say so far so good. They’ve changed the text zoom feature to a full page zoom system, which I personally hate because it mens my zooming a page now makes me scroll just to see all of the text I m trying to read, but in the current nightly build they fixed the bug that crashes Minefield/Firefox 3 (also known by its internal codename, Gran Paradiso) when you pasted text into a rich text field. That was a major pain in my arse, especially with the blogging I’ve been doing lately, and it’s freeing me up to use Fx3 a lot more often, which allows me to better test the next version of Mozilla’s flagship browser.
Once Fx3 reaches beta status I’ll post a link so you can help test it, although I may hold off until it reaches it’s second or third beta, simply because it really isn’t meant for daily use yet.
Update 12:03 an Saturday, 17 November: Mozilla’s Mike Shaver calls the 80% number bandied about in Mr. Keizer’s article “an honest mistake” since some meeting notes did include that figure. But he also on to give an accurate definition of “bug” in Mozilla’s world.
“Bug” in our world — as with every software shop I’ve ever worked, to be honest — includes desired feature improvements, optimizations, basically everything in the gap between “how the software is” and “how someone would like the software to be”. Because of history and some tool limitations, and because we now have a larger set of people triaging blocker nominations than we ever have before, the “blocking” flag doesn’t always strictly mean “we would not ship Firefox 3 if this specific bug isn’t fixed”. It can also mean “we should look at this in more detail before we ship” or “we’d like to focus developers on this set of bugs” or “don’t forget to do something (release note, document workaround, reach out to site authors, etc.) here before we ship”.
He goes on to say that they do want to get Firefox 3 out to users sooner, because of some of the “tens of thousands of improvements there”, some of which he names, but he also says that they need (rather than want) to make it to make sure it’s a product good enough for their quarter-billion users and that makes getting it right more important than getting it out the door. As someone who participated in the recent Mozilla Test days I have to say I agree. The QA folks were on IRC during the bug days to not only help answer questions, but to make sure new bug reports got filed and to help us really see how Firefox 3 would respond under real world conditions. I applaud Mozilla for not only doing this, but to open it up to non programmers like me to help make sure the browser we love is “right”, and to hell with “on time.”
You can read Shaver’s post in What makes Firefox 3. There’s a lot more to be read, so you definitely want to follow that link. Asa Dotzler says he likes it, and the only issue he has with it is that Mike “didn’t use the word ‘horseshit’ anywhere in it 
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Mike Shaver said
Thanks for the nice note, and especially for your participation in test days. They make a huge difference, and without people like you we couldn’t make Firefox the huge success it’s become. Thank you, Nanci!
Peng said
@Year One:
The only other blog I wrote for was my own, which you would have known had you checked out the About Peng page. But as I said on the other post you commented on, welcome to my Spam list. Btw. if you had only posted a comment on one thread you may have slipped through a little more easily, but when I saw you wrote comments on two posts, especially after glancing at your comments, I quickly saw you were nothing but another damned comment spammer.