Updated: Mozilla Community Contributor Departs Over Bug Handling

An anonymous reader writes "A blog post published by Mozilla community contributor Tyler Downer claims the Mozilla Triage QA process is broken, and he believes that the rapid release implementation does not work with their current method of handling bugs. Quoting: 'I understand that change takes time, and there is always a delay between planning a change, and the implementation. But with Triage, time is our enemy. We currently have 2,598 UNCO bugs in Firefox that haven’t been touched in 150 days. That is almost 2600 bugs that have not been touched since Firefox 4 was released. ... In Spring 2010, we hit roughly 13,000 UNCO bugs in the Firefox product on BMO. 13,000!!! We currently have 5,934. While this is an improvement, that is 6,000 bugs in Firefox that could be shipping today, and enhancements that could be making the web better (of course it isn’t that high, but the potential is there). This is several thousand contributors that we have told "Thank you for filing a bug report with us. We don’t really care about it, and we are going to let it sit for 6 months and just ask you to retest when you know it isn’t fixed, but thank you anyway."'" Update: 08/29 19:46 GMT by S : Downer has made another blog post clarifying the bug issue. Updated title and summary to reflect that he was a volunteer, not a Mozilla employee.

You're wrong about addons

[DeadCatX2]

I upgraded to Aurora last week (Firefox 8 now). It's pretty amazing.

For a product that allegedly has 6000 bugs, I don't encounter very many, and I use Firefox on three different machines every day and I know plenty of others who use it every day. So either they're very esoteric, or very rare. Hmm...fix bugs that bother 0.001% of users, or add features that benefit 1% of users? As a developer, it's a tradeoff.

But my main point is that addons are not broken. I'm using the exact same addons I used in Firefox 3 - I should know because I didn't download new ones. All you have to do is open the xpi in e.g. 7zip or winrar, open the install.rdf in a text editor, search for maxVersion, and change it to match your version. Change it to something big, like 10, and you'll be in the clear for a long time.

Re:FF was good, then...

[LordLimecat]

Way to read the article. Tyler specifically mentions in the first 10 sentences that he love Rapid Release, and it has absolutely nothing to do with his departure.

His complaint is the same as the complaints have always been for Firefox-- it takes forever for bugs to get fixed.

Re:What is UNCO?

[Smallpond]

I tried googling but all I get are hits about a college. No one ever defines what UNCO is. I even found INCO, but no definition for that either.

UNCO is short for UNCONFIRMED, the state a bug is in between being filed and being rejected because its asking for something a general user would want.

Re:You're wrong about addons

[WankersRevenge]

All you have to do is open the xpi in e.g. 7zip or winrar, open the install.rdf in a text editor, search for maxVersion, and change it to match your version. Change it to something big, like 10, and you'll be in the clear for a long time.

Holy shit ... I can't believe I just read that. That's not a solution. That's not even close to one. It may work for you and other developers, but for the average user, you might as well have them download another browser.

What someone needs to do is actually fix the add-on code in firefox itself so that users don't have to jump through hoops for every release. This new release schedule is forcing people to avoid upgrading which is the last thing you want.

Re:FF was good, then...

[BBTaeKwonDo]

GreaseMonkey scripts can run in Chrome; just drag and drop them into the Chrome window. They can be enabled/disabled in chrome://extensions.

Some Clarification.

[Tyler Downer]

First off, I never intended my post to be taken in the way that it was. Simply because there are 6000 UNCO bugs in the Firefox product does not mean that Firefox has 6000 bugs in it. Out of all those bugs, the majority are going to be duplicates of other bugs, they are going to be user error, they are going to be bugs caused by a misbehaving extension that a user installed on Firefox, and so on. Out of all those 6000 bugs, I'd estimate at most there are 1000 REAL bugs in Firefox, and that is an extremely high guess. What I was trying to say is that without going through and triaging all those bugs, we have no way of knowing which are real and should be taken seriously, and which are not real bugs. If you read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#status [mozilla.org], you will see: "This bug has recently been added to the database. Nobody has validated that this bug is true. Users who have the "canconfirm" permission set may confirm this bug, changing its state to NEW. Or, it may be directly resolved and marked RESOLVED. " An UNCO bug has not be confirmed yet, it needs to be marked as NEW before it is considered a real bug. So it isn't fair to say that Firefox shipped with 6000 bugs, but more that there are roughly 2600 bugs that haven't been touched in 150 days, which is far more worrisome to me. We will never be able to have 0 bugs, but we may at least have a quick response to the bugs we do get. That is what my whole blog post was about, quick responses, and treating our reporters fairly. Unfortunately, Conceivably Tech was too eager to get a shocking headline, and so misconstrued my points. If you come back to re-read my blog in a day or two, I'll post more clarifications.

Re:Too many open bugs?

[Tyler Downer]

Yes, and those People are banned after fair warning. So we already have steps to try to control spam.

Sounds like the PHP dev team...

[lbalbalba]

Sadly, I have had similar experiences with PHP where my web server dumped core the moment the php module was loaded by the web server. I faithfully reproduced the issue, and included back traces in the reports, for over 8 months long with god knows how many different versions of PHP. The results were always the same, and every time a developer finally got around to looking at the bug report, they simply said: "you are running an old version of PHP, please retry with the latest version.". After zillions of retry's of different PHP versions with the exact same backtrace, I decided to give up and stated so in the bug report. The bug was then closed as 'BOGUS'.