Updated: Mozilla Community Contributor Departs Over Bug Handling 334
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.
FF was good, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla community is killing Firefox with their super-fast releases. we went from 4 to 7 in no time.. (i'm on the beta channel)
Addons break non stop because of upgrades
Bugs arent being fixed
= Users will leave soon ?
Re:FF was good, then... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Firefox lost "good" long before the rapid releases began. Rapid releases were just a (failed) attempt to fix the suck.
I'm not sure Firefox ever really lost anything, though. It's possible my tolerance for lame cross platform solutions has just gone way, way down.
This problem has infected so many FOSS projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox gets personas, syncs, tab groups, etc. instead of bug fixes.
GNOME3.
Unity.
Version number treadmills.
Ad nauseam.
Change for the sake of change. Bleeding edge bullet points for the bloggers instead of bugfixes for the users.
How about returning to our roots and building software which runs faster with less bugs. There are plenty of commercial options for those who want the glassy artwork and UI equivalent of smooth jazz.
How about software for people who need to get things done.
Remember when we took pride in something like Apache being vastly superior to IIS? Now the community seems to hang its head in shame that Mac has spiffier icons and a hipper dock or Chrome gets new version numbers on a faster schedule.
Re:FF was good, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they? I'm just a user and I had no problems with the fast releases.
Because every new release is increasingly dumbed down and randomly removes user interface components or moves them around so you have to find them again and then remember where they were when you go back to an old version? And your only choice is either 3.6 or the current latest version because they now refuse to support any other versions?
The only thing really keeping me on Firefox now is Noscript.
Re:You're wrong about addons (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"All you have to do" fail for 90% of the people we talked into using Firefox a few years back.
Re:I suspect that after this announcement... (Score:5, Insightful)
why reinvent the wheel?
Because after long enough time, there's always someone who's irked about the performance of the wheel and wants to replace it with conveyor belts or robot legs. Sometimes even square wheels. And because we've done round wheels for so long, old lessons have faded or been deemed outdated and so we try it. Then it turns out it's not that great except for very limited use cases, but we're too deep invested and stubborn so we'll try fixing it. After a lot of fighting against windmills, we slowly reinvent and rediscover the reasons why we used a wheel in the first place. Then the cycle starts over. Same with most NIH projects, they start out as being radically different and then end up looking much the same after tackling the same challenges.
Re:FF was good, then... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still waiting on a bug to be fixed that dates back to version 4 beta. It's not something trivial, I get a BSoD after about 15-20 minutes of regular use. I've looked online, I've submitted bugs, I've done just about everything they've suggested, save one: 'Turn off Crossfire whenever I use their browser', and frankly, that's in no way a real solution at all.
Applications per se won't give you a BSOD, because that generally means something went horribly wrong in kernel mode. Sounds like the ATI drivers have a bug that causes a crash with Crossfire enabled, and Firefox can't rewrite those drivers for you.
Re:You're wrong about addons (Score:5, Insightful)
I moved my parents onto Firefox (with a few key addons) so that I wouldn't have to do this kind of shit to keep their computer running. If I'm going to bother with anything, it would be to point them to the Opera or Chrome installer. That's easier than either of your suggestions, both for me and for them.
Re:You're wrong about addons (Score:3, Insightful)
people just switch.
Re:Important Points; But Not a "Community Lead" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Important Points; But Not a "Community Lead" (Score:4, Insightful)
And, of course, when Tyler says we have told bug reporters we don't care about their bug reports, that's not actually true. He is suggesting that this is what it might seem like.
This is actually worse. If you're not going to act like you care about bug reports, don't tell people you do care about bug reports.
Re:Before the flames begin... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many open bugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know of a troll who files bug reports just to piss people off; last time he tried to claim an About window displaying the same information as every other GUI app in existence is "a bug and confusing people". Maybe you should ban people like him from the system, just saying.
Re:Mozilla Foundation is badly managed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know a single user that fits that "typical" though I'm sure they exist in droves.
The users I know
1) 50+ tabs open at all times the browser never gets shut down unless there's a problem. This is the type of person who uses tabs as a way of storing what they'd like to read at some point or are doing research and need to draw from a lot of sources. They typically know search engines well enough to use them but not well enough to find the same thing twice.
2) One tab only, they could switch to Netscape Navigator and be just fine
3) Hammers youtube constantly. Browser based games (ie: heavy flash/java use). These are usually kids
4) Opens/closes tabs fast an furiously - rarely ever uses the back/forward button instead would rather open a new tab and redownload it. Doesn't shut down the browser because it takes too long to load. Geeks mostly.
#2 is the only one Firefox does well.