Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla's 200,000th bug will soon be reported. Not terribly exciting in itself, but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug reporting tool. The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day. Anyone can enter, so let's see if we can have a Slashdot winner (we can all share in the glory)! To help you, they're up to 178,325 and 51 bugs have been filled today. (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"

Comments

I love mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.

Brent Jackson

Re:I love mozilla

[psavo]

most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies.

Re:I love mozilla

[yatest5]

most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies.

Yeah I'd like it to load in less than a week and use less that 128Mb to view 'HelloWorld.html'.

;-).

Re:I love mozilla

[mazur]

In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.

I'm not; it's part of human nature. There are even people, who will find fault with the weather, when it's perfect, so why should 200.000 bug reports surprise anyone? And don't forget, lots of those may be a case of PEBKAC.

Stefan.

Re:I love mozilla

[The Original Yama]

In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.

... cue for somebody to link to some bullshit MozillaQuest article. That Mike Angelo guy really pisses me off with his FUD.

Re:I love mozilla

[Squareball]

C'mon, let's keep our wishes in the realm of possibilites ;) hehehe

Re:I love mozilla

[serial frame]

<kairi@heavyarms 0sys-3>$ ps u | grep phoenix
kairi 25467 0.0 0.7 2068 728 tty1 S Nov04 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/phoenix http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25469 0.0 0.7 2148 732 tty1 S Nov04 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/local/phoenix/run-mozilla.sh ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25475 1.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 8:59 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25477 0.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 0:00 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25478 0.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 0:02 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25479 0.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 0:00 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 25481 0.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 0:03 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/
kairi 30311 0.0 31.1 53368 29284 tty1 S Nov04 0:00 ./phoenix-bin http://freshmeat.net/

Those are a lot of processes...:-/

Re:I love mozilla

[bumby]

One for each tab/window +1 for the thread-handler.

Re:I love mozilla

[TurdTapper]

I'd have to agree on the PEBKAC, I'd have to say that's 75% of my dealings with end-users. Anyone know how many ACTUAL bugs (not enhancements, end-user idiocy, etc) that Mozilla actually had? I'd like to see that number next to the 200,000.

Re:I love mozilla

[Lozzer]

Those are a lot of threads, displayed by a ps that doesn't grok threads

Re:I love mozilla

[mnordstr]

"In all the years"

Sounds like you've been using it for decades. Mozilla is only 4 years old =)

Re:I love mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try using it, then...

Re:I love mozilla

[Jucius Maximus]

"most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies."

And a massive pile of duplicate reports to boot.

Re:I love mozilla

[Cujo]

I just reported bug number 178447. Of the bugs I report, I would suppose about a third turn out to be duplicates or pilot error. However, it's rare that I file an enhancement - I just wnat the promised features to work right.

Re:I love mozilla

[Yunzil]

In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.

They're not all unique. I filed a bug for 1.2 that ended up having somewhere around 100 other reports marked as duplicates.

Re:I love mozilla

[RealityThreek]

This is a troll, why did it get modded up? It takes less than 2 sec to load on my machine with the always-in-memory loader turned off. And it uses up about 12 megs of ram at idle (blank page), the rest is just the html and images in memory which every browser has. Seriously, I think it's comparable if not slightly higher than IE. And some dists of Mozilla, like Phoenix, Galeon, and K-Meleon are actually smaller than IE.

Re:I love mozilla

[Sj0]

If you're running windows, try K-Meleon. the .7 release just came out, which is even faster than .6, and has one hell of a good implementation of tabs(IMHO)

kmeleon.sourceforge.net

Re:I love mozilla

[kasperd]

Those are a lot of threads, displayed by a ps that doesn't grok threads

It could be running on Linux where a thread and a process is essentially the same thing.

Re:I love mozilla

[JonnyElvis42]

Yeah I'd like it to load in less than a week and use less that 128Mb to view 'HelloWorld.html'.

Oh come now, if you had a better, faster computer, you could load Mozilla in five and a half days easy, and HelloWorld.html will easily display with around 112Mb as long as you don't use any markup on it.

Awesome

[Botchka]

I used Mozilla and reported what I thought was a bug. I was surprised and elated by the response that I got in order to try to fix it. Not that this will be a terribly exciting post for other /.ers but that was my experience. However, I want to like Mozilla....really I do.

Re:Awesome

[GauteL]

What was the bug and what was the response?

I'm not trying to troll, but knowing this helps when I'm trying to form an opinion about who I'm going to side with.

Re:Awesome

[ComaVN]

I did something and then something happened. This is not interesting for anyone else but me.

Does that sum up you post?

Re:Awesome

[DeltaSigma]

And then I got a +1 Interesting.

It's the new karma whoring, people! Enjoy it!

Bugzilla...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a pretty good idea. But the problem is that the mass population rarely has the time to submit a report through Bugzilla once their Mozilla crashes. They just close it, and launch Mozilla again.

Re:Bugzilla...

[Sn4xx0r]

At the risk of feeding:

For crashes, Mozilla has the talkback feature. If Mozilla crashes, and it hardly ever does anymore, all you need to do is type the url you visited, and click send. That's it.

For other bugs: people will, and do, report them if they are really annoyed with a bug and want to see it fixed. Even if only one in a thousand take the time to file a bugreport you'd still have a pretty large number.

Re:Bugzilla...

[Anonymous Coward]

"For crashes, Mozilla has the talkback feature. If Mozilla crashes, and it hardly ever does anymore, all you need to do is type the url you visited, and click send. That's it."

Let's imagine a situation. Someone went to a pr0n site, and Mozilla crashed. You really think they will submit the URL?

Re:Bugzilla...

[Sn4xx0r]

Let's imagine a situation. Someone went to a pr0n site, and Mozilla crashed. You really think they will submit the URL?

Why not? Afraid that Asa might backtrace you by the data in the crashdump, and call your wife?

Just report the damn URL, give the developers something to enjoy. Or is your "someone" underage, maybe?

Re:Bugzilla...

[blancolioni]

Let's imagine a situation. Someone went to a pr0n site, and Mozilla crashed. You really think they will submit the URL?

Well, did you or not?

Re:Bugzilla...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no Talkback for Mac OS X. (Maybe that's why it's so bad compared to the other versions...)

Re:Bugzilla...

[Sn4xx0r]

There's no Talkback for Mac OS X.

Chimera (Mac browser based on Mozilla, like Phoenix for Linux/Windows) now has Talkback. Maybe they'll be able to backport it to Mozilla.

Re:Bugzilla...

[abdulla]

Well Mozilla crashed for the first time ever (since 0.9) for me and it took all my bookmarks with it. Worse is I'm running a talkback build and I saw no evidence of this feature at all as Mozilla segfaulted and went to hell.

How about IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many bugs in IE have been reported so far?

Re:How about IE?

[frp001]

So? What's the point in this question?
What really matters is whether the final product is up to it or not.

Re:How about IE?

[Gheesh]

I think the important question is, how many of them have been fixed due to those reports?

Re:How about IE?

[xutopia]

Well IE has a great deal of bugs as well.

The count of mozilla bugs here includes the production bugs as well. I'm sure IE went through a load of bugs while developping it. Unfortunatly these numbers are not comparable.

Re:How about IE?

[Vilim]

I tends not to have small bugs (ie renders pages a tiny bit incorrectly) it tends to have HUGE bugs (ie you credit card numbers were posted on a public forum)

How does this compare to other apps?

[Pike65]

This may be me just being hideously misinformed, but I have no idea what to expect for a project of this size? I mean it does sound like a helluva lot . . .

Mind you, I suppose it's better they all get reported and fixed than ignored until someone independant BugTraqs your ass.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of them were duplicates of bugs already reported, or problems with people's setups and not bugs in Mozilla. Hence why the submitter said, "there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla".

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[TheMidget]

It's more than 2^16, which proves that the mozilla project's bug tracking code is able to deal with numbers that large. Unlike Micro$oft, which never have more than 65535 open bugs, because else the counter overflows...

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the entire Windows2000 operating system only had 65,000 bugs when it shipped. So I guess Microsoft programmers really ARE better than Mozilla programmers. 200,000 bugs? Yikes! Obviously with IE being an integrated part of Windows it has much less than 65,000 bugs therefore IE is better than Mozilla right? :-)

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugs are like cockroaches. For every one you see, there are a hundred you haven't seen. Except for mozilla, which most have been visible due to people reporting them. Bugs that are caught don't get to procreate other bugs. So the population diminishes to a marginal capacity over time.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Brown]

It's extremely difficult to compare this with any closed-source application, as a lot of these 'bugs' were in pre-1.0 versions - which never see the light of day in commercial software. Windows 2000 was however rumoured to have shipped with roughly 65000 unresolved bugs.

- Chris

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Zocalo]

Windows 2000 was however rumoured to have shipped with roughly 65000 unresolved bugs.

<OLDJOKE>It actually shipped with far more than that, but Microsoft's bug tracking system itself had a bug whereby it couldn't handle more than 65,535 bugs.<\OLDJOKE>

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Hmm. Mozilla is a ground-breaking project using cutting-edge technology (or it was cutting-edge when it was started). I think that there will be a lot of software engineering papers on the Mozilla processs in the future. It is a bold project, and I believe it has succeeded because of persistence and eye-ball-count rather than good planning and solid methodology.

Then again, a lot of developers had a lot of fun and AOL Time Warner footed the bill, so who are we to complain (except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development)?

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[alphatool]

I heard that 18,000 bugs were reported by beta testers for win2k. (My company was a beta tester, and we discovered about 4,000.
I think other people would have found more.)

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Luke-Jr]

Try comparing Win2k to Mozilla1.0. Those 200,000 bugs include duplicates and are also all the bugs in Mozilla's history. Or you could compare the 200,000 bugs to all the bugs in MSIE since it has existed (don't forget to count bugs found at MS before a release!)

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[BinBoy]

Don't know about a project of that size but here's the data for a 60,000 line project:

Annually I receive 1 email per 17 lines of total code. This includes all bug reports, suggestions, general support and general business related to the software. It does not include spam or personal email.

It does include:

1 bug report per 120 lines of total code.

1 suggestion per 214 lines of total code.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most commercial apps developed under similar software engineering tools (read CM with integrated bug tracking) track bugs from inception.
The key is not how many bugs you have but how many unique, open bugs you have. A lot of filtering has to go on before a bug becomes a bug. There are lots of duplicate reports, unreproducibles, etc.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

because else the counter overflows...

nice grammar
up coding a little late last night were we? ;)

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Jucius Maximus]

"It's more than 2^16, which proves that the mozilla project's bug tracking code is able to deal with numbers that large. Unlike Micro$oft, which never have more than 65535 open bugs, because else the counter overflows..."

I guess this proves that they are using excel as a bug tracking database -- it can only suppot 2^16 rows.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Citizen of Earth]

a lot of these 'bugs' were in pre-1.0 versions - which never see the light of day in commercial software

Wha? In commercial software, pre-1.0 beta releases are called "1.0" up to "2000".

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Kidbro]

If you look closer at the actual bug list, you'll notice that few of those are what would normally be labelled "bugs".
To begin with, there are lots and lots of duplicates. Second, there's a lot of feature requests, which is something completely different. I'm not sure I find it a good idea to report both bugs and feature/improvement requests in the same forum, but that's the path they've chosen. It's also possible to see some of these reports contradict eachother. Specifically the feature requests - I can't remember a good example, but think "I want ctrl-i to execute function foo" vs "I want ctrl-i to execute function bar".
And don't forget the few outright lies you find in there.

I wouldn't want to guess at the actual real bug/noise ration in the reports on Mozilla, but I can guarantee that they're far less than 200k.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Citizen of Earth]

<OLDJOKE>...<\OLDJOKE>

Parse error: Expecting </OLDJOKE> but found <\OLDJOKE> instead.
Suggested action: Upgrade to MS-XML 2.2.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

65,535 = 21

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[alienw]

You can't judge the bugginess of the software such as Mozilla by the number of bugs in bugzilla. Any major bug will have 20-30 duplicates reported, many bugs are requests for enhancement, some are incorrect, some are just bullshit, some are meta-bugs that actually track the progress on a certain component, and most of them are currently closed.

Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[eMilkshake]

I believe Netscape 1.0 would be worth more than Moz 1.0 -- that's what I'd rather have.

<old timer mode>I remember Netscape .9, and wondering if it would ever reach 1.0. We'd say, what more could 1.0 do -- it's such a revolution!</otm>

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[Soulslayer]

Wasn't Netscape .9 still called Mosaic?

I remember when I first started messing around with Mosaic on the X-Terms at UW Milwaukee. When hypertext and imbedded images were still an astonishing thing.

And that one X-Term facing the back wall of the computer lab always had pr0n on its 21" display whether someone was using the terminal or not.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be a CD, and nobody has any more of those little antistatic sleeves for mailing floppies.

Heck, I rather have Netscape 1.0 on a 5.25" disk.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[alphatool]

Dude, you NEED a beer (or 5 (or 6))

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[ciupmean]

Dude, you need a brain...

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[Jugalator]

What about Windows 1.01 (or here, here or here?

Did someone ask for Netscape 0.9 beta (including a review - haha!)

I feel bad for direct linking, but hey, Windows is only 700K and Netscape around 300K. :-)

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was dubbed Mosaic Netscape, so yes and no.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[GreyWolf3000]

Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)

They were right, dammit.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[ceejayoz]

Wow... NS 0.9 seems to work better than NS 4.x!

That's pretty damn cool.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[red_gnom]

I downloaded this new cool Mosaic browser, and I am going to try it tonight.

Is it bether then IE?

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[TaliesinWI]

Oh, come now, they didn't _always_ have pr0n on them...occasionally people would play Xtrek or something along those lines.

From my admittedly rusty memory, Mosaic 1.0 was early 1993 (at least for UNIX, which is the only net-connected OS I was playing on at the time) and Netscape .9 popped up either late '93 or early '94 as the first somewhat usable version.

Re:Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0?

[KAMiKAZOW]

Whoa, Netscape 0.9 Beta r0x0Rz. It can't even open http://www.google.de/. It just tells me
302 Moved
The document has moved
here.

Damn cool!

Worth

[Klerck]

Yep, I'm selling these IE1.0 CDs on ebay and making a fortune! (Off the tech support charges that is)

Re:Worth

[Jugalator]

Yep, I'm selling these IE1.0 CDs on ebay and making a fortune!

I won't buy it at least, since I can get IE 1.0 for free. Ha! That along with Winamp 0.20 give me a whole new multimedia experience!

Re:Worth

[Ilgaz]

IE 1 wasn't free. It came with the Microsoft Plus! Windows 95 package, confusing newbies that it is the only way to get on Internet.

IE 2 shipped as free but you can't see many UI differences, so they are actually confused.

Oh btw, both sucked as browsers but they were clean! nothing was into system directory, didn't take over your OS, wasn't an evil attempt to kill Netscape, so you didn't hate them.

Re:Worth

[markhb]

Oh, I think Spyglass hated them... once they started giving out the product for free....

If you don't understand this, try Help/About Internet Explorer in any Windows copy of IE....

--
Remainder of my .sig: be the majority of voters

Only 200,000?

[Sex_On_The_Beach]

And you all complain that Windows IE crashes and is full of bugs.

Re:Only 200,000?

[DrXym]

Erm, it doesn't have 200,000 bugs right now, that is for its entire lifetime, for the last 3 years. If you want to see how many there are now, open http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi (not via Slashdot) and find out. I will save you the trouble and tell you there are 28992 open bugs. Compare that the IE / Windows figures - oops you can't because they are hidden. Who knows what bugs are in your operating system?

That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.

uhmmm... just wait a second...

[jukal]

but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported

before I finish this shell script to flood the bug report database... reset rate-counter...right, the 200 000th bug will be reported in about 42 minutes and 42 seconds. I mean seriously, their intention is probably good - to get serious bug reports - but you can just assume the side effects with all the geeks involved :)

Re:uhmmm... just wait a second...

[henben]

Yeah, this is as stupid as the SETI league table turned out to be.

Bug, glitch, style issue...

[melonman]

Am I the only person who thinks that counting bugs, all bugs, any bugs, is a bit meaningless? I mean, 1,000 bugs like 'left margin on submit buttons is 1 px too narrow on some displays' worry me less than 1 bug like 'all your credit card details will be posted on 500 weblogs around the world'. What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale, where a 'light breeze' bug could almost be called an endearing quirk, and a 'hurricane' bug is likely to trash your hard disc...

What about IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many bugs would have been found in Internet Explorer? IE being a much more mature browser, you'd imagine it would have had many more bugs than this reported. I suppose while MS keeps all it's work behind closed doors, we'll never know the answer.

Let's just hope that one day mozilla can be as good as IE.

Re:What about IE?

[draxil]

Well, much as I hate jumping for the obvious bait.. Lots of us already think mozilla is better than IE, and Phoenix is looking more usable still. Say what you like about IE loading quickly (except on macos which makes most believe that most of it is memory resident in windoze anyway..) but I wouldn't give up my tabbed browsing, popup blacklisting and easy customisations for the world. Maybe one day IE will be as good as Phoenix :)

Hang on a minute. Were you being sarcastic?

The most annoying being...

[gleather]

freeze when a site uses flash and you're playing xmms. freeze when the site contacts ad.doubleclick.whatever.

Grrr.

Re:The most annoying being...

[Vilim]

I never noticed that one.

Re:The most annoying being...

[anshil]

Thats easy I guess I got the same, if you trace mozilla you will notice that it hangs at opening "/dev/dsp" which is blocked by xmms.

You're running xmms using artsd? If not you should ;) Then don't start mozilla normally, start it with "artsdsp /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla", artsdsp will force mozilla to work with artsd, and wolla xmms and mozilla share happily the same sound device via artsd. (and mozilla does not hand anymore)

Re:The most annoying being...

[Luke-Jr]

+1 Insightful

Re:The most annoying being...

[protonman]

I believe current versions of flash use esd. So you could also use the esd output plugin in xmms. Or do as I do; (if you're using ALSA and have 2 DACs) run xmms with oss output on the first DAC, and esd on the second, which will be used by flash.

Re:The most annoying being...

[ciupmean]

There's nothing like using a sblive .. .;) no hangs on /dev/dsp

Re:The most annoying being...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get the latest (beta?) version of the flash plugin, it fixes the problem!

Re:The most annoying being...

[cjpez]

Someone else in this thread recommended using arts. Ugh, don't . . . An AC suggested upgrading to the 6.0beta version of Flash; that'll fix the problem right up for you. In case you hadn't heard, the problem was entirely within the Flash plugin. The method they were using to open /dev/dsp forced it to block until it got exclusive access to your soundcard, which means that you'd have to actually STOP xmms or whatever was using your soundcard. It's a really, really, really simple fix, and the code for it was even posted in the Bugzilla bug (search around for it) and sent in to Macromedia, but obviously nobody at Macromedia got around to fixing the thing. Let's hear it for closed-source applications!

It was a really simple fix, too. All you had to do was add a flag to the open() commmand. Macromedia wasn't exactly ignoring the product, either. Since the bug was reported to them (with solution, remember), they've had two or three minor releases of that line of Flash plugin, and nobody there bothered to fix that one line of code. Highly frustrating. One of the more recent posts on the Bugzilla bug was from someone at Macromedia, though, apologizing for how long it's taken, and the 6.0beta does fix the problem.

Anyway, that's more than you probably ever wanted to know about the thing. The only way Mozilla itself could have fixed this was to make all plugins threaded, so if the thread hangs nobody cares, but that's a lot of work that nobody felt like doing. Oh, and people were originally thinking they could just do a binary-patch to the flash plugin, but evidentally the extra flag to open() increases the bytecount of the command by one, which makes doing so rather impossible . . .

Re:The most annoying being...

[wowbagger]

This really isn't Mozilla's fault - it is the fault of the plugin blocking on opening /dev/dsp, rather than moving on.

And it it "Voila" - literally "look at that", not wolla.

Re:The most annoying being...

[anshil]

And it it "Voila" - literally "look at that", not wolla.

Oh, we are nitpicking? Well 'And it is "Voila"', isn't it?

Re:The most annoying being...

[Salsaman]

The flash issue has now been fixed in the latest flash beta.

(Do a search in the page for 'bugzilla' and you will see that two mozilla bugs have been addressed.)

Re:The most annoying being...

[WWWWolf]

You're running xmms using artsd? If not you should ;)

OR get a sound card that supports hardware mixing (well, most modern soundcards do that) and get Linux sound driver for that card that supports hardware mixing (ALSA is a good bet, especially with the OSS emulation module).

I use SBLive! and ALSA, never had any problems with Flash...

Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that Mozilla hasn't any bu

Re:Bah!

[Elbereth]

I think you pressed submit a little early.

Re:Bah!

[Make]

mozilla's textarea has always been very buggy.

Re:Bah!

[ciupmean]

Hello, hello hello hello (times 100000) .. equals the echo inside your empty humourless head ;D That joke was so obvious ;)

Re:Bah!

[the way, what're you]

I think you pressed submit a little early.

Not many bugs, eh?

[Munra]

So what's all this about: Mozilla riddled with security holes.

Even with the "bugs", I still love Mozilla, mind :)

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[mccalli]

The Register article refers to Mozilla 1.0 and 1.0.1, not the current versions.

Actually, I think one bug mentioned there was supposed to apply to current versions.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[DrXym]

Who said Mozilla was perfect? The difference is you can see what bugs are open, assess their importance and see when they are fixed. If a bug bothers you that much, you can even take the patch and retroactively apply it to a branch, e.g. 1.0.x or wait for the next nightly of course. You don't have to wait months for the next 'service pack' or listen to MS or whoever when they fob you off saying an exploit is 'theoretical'.

Of course, security issues are hidden in Bugzilla until they are made public, but that once they become public knowledge (e.g. through The Register article) they are are unlocked. The locked phase is just a period of grace to allow the problem to be worked on privately without alerting every script kiddie to its existence.

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't exactly call 6 security issues to be "riddled". I'm pretty sure at any given time IE has had at least 6 outstanding security holes (except with IE you usually get holes that involve things like executing arbitrary code).

I don't know why their so concerned with more bugs when they still haven't fixed the double extention problem in windows that has been there for MONTHS now.

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[ajs]

Version 1.0 had six security-related bugs that have now been fixed, and a new verison is out (1.0.1). If you compare this to version 1.0 of any proprietary Web-related software, I think you'll see the difference. Six sounds like a big number until you start having to use more than just fingers and toes to keep track of JUST the major security problems!

Mozilla is also easier to find those bugs in. I feel much more confident that Mozilla's security problems will be found and fixed than I do with any proprietary software.

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

IE has 31 unpatched public vulnerabilities at the moment. Not long ago it was 32. Imagine how many would be discovered if we had even a small portion of the IE source code. ;)

estimation

[mirko]

According to the whois database :
Record created on 24-Jan-1998.

So, 1747 days have gone since this creation (I assume nobody could file bugs on mozilla.org before this date).

We now have 178,325 bugs, so the average is 102 bugs per day.

So, the next 21,675 bugs will be files in approximately 212 days, making the 200kth bug being filed around June 5th...

Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...

But why expecting a CD when we have apt-get ? ;-)

How, yes : because it would not be the 1.0 version but rather a subsequent one.

Re:estimation

[mirko]

Of course, Bugzilla.org was created on Thu, Jan 06, 2000 but I guess bugs were still filed before, no ?

Re:estimation

[mirko]

With the latter figure but using the same reasoning, I get 125 days from now, which is the 10th of March, 2003.

Re:estimation

[Captain Large Face]

The bug database isn't just defects in the build, but also requested features.

Re:estimation

[IamTheRealMike]

Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...

Actually rate of bug filings speeds up as Mozilla gets more stable. It seems counterintuitive, but as Mozilla gets better more people use it, and so you get a) more dupes, b) more feature requests and c) preexisting bugs are found faster and more times.

You might have to adjust your equations slightly :)

circumventing the /. effect

[Masami Eiri]

and I quote "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled." Looks like someone has the right idea.

Re:circumventing the /. effect

[mirko]

Well, after reading your post, I just openened a new browser and got there from Google!... :)

Re:circumventing the /. effect

[Masami Eiri]

You could just copy and paste the link

Re:circumventing the /. effect

[mirko]

Yes, but isn't it quicker for you, this way ?

if THAT is considered news...

[Frac]

Competiton: Slashdot's 10,000,000th Typo
Posted by CmdrTaco on 08:00 AM November 5th, 2002
from the VA's-lowered-budget-can't-afford-spellcheckers dept.
CmdrTaco writes "Slashdot is about to see its 10,000,000th typo. Tis is the 9,999,999th one. Not terribly exciting in itself, but we're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the slashdot hoard will notice the milestone-breaking spelling mistake. The prize is a poster-size copy of Mrs. Malda's revealing low-cut shot." The typo will show up anytime now - good lukc everyone!

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[sirinek]

Well, if you want to get technical, you did it with "hoard". Although that is a correct spelling of a word, you probably meant "horde". :)

siri

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[thisisatest]

And even if Mozilla gets a form spellchecker one day, that won't help Taco. He and most of the other editors use IE on Macs these days.

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Psiren]

Well, that's a grammatical error and shows a lack of understanding of the English language. Which can be excused for non-english speakers, but not for native speakers. Spelling mistakes are more often than not typos.

Grammatical errors just make me think the writer is stupid, and therefore the comment has little merit.

Note for the stupid:

They're having a party.
Their party was crap.
The party is over there.

See the difference? No? Well you're (that's short for "you are") stupid then. Here endeth the pointless lesson.

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Captain Large Face]

10,000,000th since when? Oh wait, that's gotta be since the beginning of November, right?

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Cyph]

Actually, he did it with the "competiton". :)

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are stupid. Did you notice that your writing is filled with sentence fragments?

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Frac]

yeah you're right. :) dammit, I hate it when I can't proofread correctly after allnighters..

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Frac]

well, if you want to get technical :)

1) competiton was just a cut and paste off the real slashdot article.. so I happened to overlook that..

2) the word "competiton" was before "tis", which was supposed to be the 9,999,999th typo. So assuming we're going to ignore the "hoard" screwup, lukc is still the 10,000,000th typo :)

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the typo probably came sooner than you expected. "the slashdot hoard" should have been "the slashdot horde".

(For those who do not understand the concept of a homonym, "hoard" is a verb meaning "to save" while "horde" is a noun meaing a "pack" or "gang."

Re:if THAT is considered news...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

But given that they all sound the same, it's still possable to make that mistake, even if you are fully aware of the differences. It's just a mistake in a different part of the brain.
I've used 'their' instead of 'there' once on /., and got a big lecture about it. I already know the difference. It was just early in the morning and I wasn't thinking straight.
Does this make me stupid? No, just like making a typo doesn't mean I don't know the layout of a keyboard.
Also, a lot of times grammer errors are overlooked because people are looking so hard for typos.

Re:I love mozilla - Phoenix too!

[rapidweather]

I've been trying Phoenix for Windows and Linux, and
have been told it is based on a lot of mozilla code.
Phoenix is very nice, but won't run on Redhat 6.1 like Opera will. :-(

Sign me up!

[downerad]

Wow, a prize that someday might actually be worth something. Perhaps I'll be able to sell it and buy something really valuable, like lottery tickets!

A dumb idea

[an_mo]

This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. The incentive is just to encourage fake bug reporting, with costs rather than benefits, to the whole project.

A better choice would have been to pick a random winner from valid bugs filed from today until bug 200K.

Re:A dumb idea

[Queuetue]

Read again - the bug submitter doesn't win. It's pool to guess when the bug will be submitted.

Re:A dumb idea

[Gerv]

Given that we get 300+ bug reports a day, you would have to file a _lot_ of fake bug reports to influence the result. And, after about 5 fake bug reports, I would find you and LART your ass. :-)

Gerv

Re:A dumb idea

[*xpenguin*]

I predict that the 200,000th bug will be reported in 10 seconds.

*floods bugzilla with fake reports*

Now do you understand?

Re:A dumb idea

[anthony_dipierro]

Still, LARTing people's asses doesn't seem like a very productive way to spend people's time. Then again, they are AOL employees.

Re:Mozilla

[Letch]

Hey, spot on.

6 Security flaws reported here.

Re:Mozilla

[StefMeister]

Knowing that project as I do, it will probably be a security issue.

Don't make personal claims when posting as Anonymous coward, it sucks all the credibility out of them. But, let me guess, there was probably not much credibility to begin with.

Oh goodie...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't they already block having /. link to Bugzilla ("/. referers disabled")? I'm not sure that this'll help any... I fear they'll just get innundated with crappy bug reports as the "first post" syndrome takes ahold of bored geeks...

Re:How about IE? - Answer: 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, that's after the number has wrapped around after reaching MAXLONG.

Other news...

[Kj0n]

A bug has been discovered in Bugzilla, which caused it to count every reported bug 5 times. This brings the total number of reported bugs in BugZilla to 83240.

As soon as people read Slashdot this morning...

[ari_j]

I doubt it'll last long if Slashdot's users care enough to compete - just don't Slashdot the bug reporting page.

Bad Journalism

[afra242]

(NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"

Reminds me of some awful news stations around here:

Although only 300 people died in the earthquake, it could have been worst.

Re:Bad Journalism

[Houdini91]

(NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"

Reminds me of some awful news stations around here


Rhat reminds me of something else entirely: just replace "Mozilla" with "Slashdot" and "bugs" with "new posts".


- Houdini

Re:Bad Journalism

[Tosta Dojen]

He's saying that the number of bugs is not equal to the number of bug reports. This is because lots were duplicates of already reported bugs, or not-reproducible bugs, etc.

Therefore, while 200,000 bugs have been reported, that many bugs do not actually exist.

Got it?

OpenSource and the bug count

[DigitalOZ]

If this bug count is actually high for this kind of project (and I'm not sure that it is), I imagine it would have to do with the fact that it is an OpenSource project. In a traditional development method, there would be a great deal of internal testing that might result in less bugs being noticed by users. In a situation like Mozilla, there would be so many users testing the product through the development life cycle that many bugs would be reported that might have already been anticipated or discovered and repaired by the time it was being used by users. It seems that instead of a more traditional cycle of build, test, repair, release, in OpenSource you have a build, release, test, repair, release which probably results in inflated bug counts.

200,000 reported...

[Penguinoflight]

Not 200,000 bugs that are bugs. There are many, many duplicate bugs even though Mozilla asks people to look over the bugs and not duplicate. Also, many of these bugs are actually to get Mozilla to render a page "Correctly" when the page is written totally wrong, I.E. not W3.org valid, like slashdot.org, only worse. My guess is that about 1/3 of the bugs are really bugs, the rest are dups, features, or just dumb stuff.

Re:200,000 reported...

[Nailer]

Also, many of these bugs are actually to get Mozilla to render a page "Correctly" when the page is written totally wrong, I.E. not W3.org valid, like slashdot.org, only worse.

A document viewer's primary aim is to view documents - to support web standards may also be an aim, but its not the primary one. Most documents aren't written in W3C HTML, but Mozilla should and must render these documents correctly to function as a practical web browser. If it fails to render non compliant data (i.e., most of thwe web) its a bug in that it prevents Mozilla from being used my most of its target audience.

Re:200,000 reported...

[Penguinoflight]

Right, but most of the web also follows somewhat closely to "good code" Some of these sites are just so terrible, well, it's really really hard to say how it SHOULD be rendered. Remember, just because IE is the major browser doesn't mean it renders everything right, and with 5.5, 6.0, 5.0 all being different... not to mention mac it's impossible to tell.

So the prize is...

[BluBrick]

...buggy software?

Include me out!

(C'mon, I get it, really I do ;)

Artsd

[vbweenie]

Am I right in thinking that using artsd to manage its multimedia is one of the big reasons why KDE3 is so fricken' slow on my old PIII 450Mhz? Or is that just KDE3 in general?

If it's not really artsd's fault, then I might start using it again, although I don't think I'll be going back to KDE from Gnome until I have a much faster computer (and possibly not even then).

Veering even further off-topic: will artsd let you record and playback at the same time (with, say, Audacity)? This is something I miss, really badly, since I switched from Windows...

Re:Artsd

[anshil]

No, I ran KDE (well KDE1) perfectly on my 486-100Mhz, and it performed quite okay. A real speed for me issue was the XServer for the graphic card, when I got the correct one (instead of generic SVGA), KDE also runned several times faster.

Well if you can record and playback at the same time is more a matter what you sound card driver supports. Note not all sound card drivers are able to do that correctly. However this is a kernel issue. For example when I started expirmenting with speakfreely getting to work in full-duplex mode (speaking and hearing at the same time) was not an easy thing, as I've discovered the default audio driver SuSE picked was not able to handle this. Using not the ALSO but the driver from the linus-linux tree it was possible, altough this driver had the quirk that it hung the machine now and then when in heavy use.

Re:Artsd

[vbweenie]

The older KDE seemed a lot less demanding - I also ran it without trouble, a couple of years ago. I don't know when KDE started using artsd. Memory usage might be another issue: 64Mb of RAM doesn't seem like quite so much nowadays.

The Prize

[Anonymous Coward]

"The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day."

Emphasis on "might".

Great done, slashdot!

[yaba]

Now the maintainers of Mozilla's buzilla have to mark 21.624 bugs as invalid in the next few hours due to false bug reports from /. readers hunting for the Mozilla 1.0 release CD, which might bring wealth to the lucky winner one day.

Severity

[yerricde]

What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale

Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).

Re:Severity

[melonman]

In that case, the obvious question is 'how are the 200k-odd bugs distributed on that scale'?

Re:Severity

[DeadSea]

• 26.3% (52,618) of the 200,000 have been marked as duplicates of other bugs.
• 11.6% (23,370) of the 200,000 have been marked as not reproducable (not a bug, it works for me)
• 2.6% (5267) of the 200,000 have not yet been confirmed (likely to be dups on not reproducable
• Only 65159 unique, verifiable bugs have been reported against the browser (as opposed to bugzilla, mail/news, and other components that bugzilla tracks).
• • 2.8% (1851) of those 65159 bugs are/were blockers
  • 8.4% (5528) of those 65159 bugs are/were critical
  • 10.2% (6711) of those 65159 bugs are/were major
  • 64.1% (41803) of those 65159 bugs are/were normal
  • 4.9% (3256) of those 65159 bugs are/were minor
  • 2.2% (1401) of those 65159 bugs are/were trivial
  • 7.1% (4609) of those 65159 bugs are/were enhancment

Re:Severity

[DeadSea]

Actually another 10,224 of those 65,159 were marked as INVALID which I believe is another way of saying "not a bug". So take those stats down a bit more.

10^58 possible bugs

[frawaradaR]

Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.

Although only almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are - and will be - massively many more bugs that will never be discovered, less so reported.

Among these bugs are certain combinations of for instance 278 nested divs with a loose font tag amidst all.

Bugzilla.org != Bugzilla.mozilla.org

[yerricde]

after reading your post, I just openened a new browser and got there from Google! [redirect to www.bugzilla.org]

Except www.bugzilla.org is not bugzilla.mozilla.org. Bugzilla.org hosts information about the Bugzilla software. Bugzilla.mozilla.org hosts the bug database for Mozilla software.

When I want to link from Slashdot to an item on b.m.o, I do it through makeashorterlink.com, which replaces Referer: information so that b.m.o can't tell that a hit came from Slashdot. (It doesn't work for b.m.o's homepage because makeashorterlink.com thinks b.m.o's URL is already short enough, and tinyurl.com preserves Referer: information.)

Feature Requests are counted

[Midnight Thunder]

Amongst these 200000 bugs are feature requests, duplicates, bugs that aren't really bugs and platform specific issues. What percentage this is of the whole I am not sure, but it would certainly go to reducing the total number.

What would be of interest is how this tallies to any other product where the general public could submit straight to the bug database, rather than going through front-line, second-line and then third-line support.

I'm running this competition...

[Gerv]

...and at about 12.30pm GMT, my inbox was suddenly deluged with entries. Even without looking, I knew why that would be... :-)

Gerv

Re:I'm running this competition...

[Anonymous Coward]

> ...and at about 12.30pm GMT, my inbox was suddenly > deluged with entries. Even without looking, I knew > why that would be... :-)

I guess that would be my fault then.

-- The Anonymous Coward who wrote the article

Re:EXCUSE ME

[Luke-Jr]

Mozilla works on Windoze too, you know...

Re:Bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

what? we're at war with eurasia, we've always been at war with eurasia?

the proper phrase is "bug submissions"

[endoboy]

200,000 submissions != 200,000 bugs

is it really so hard to write a cogent article?

Re:the proper phrase is "bug submissions"

[Anonymous Coward]

> 200,000 submissions != 200,000 bugs
>
> is it really so hard to write a cogent article?

Well I did TRY:

'(NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)'

-- The Anonymous Coward who wrote the article

My guess!

[rocjoe71]

Umm... 1993! Oh no wait, that's Microsoft, you wanted Mozilla.

What about the stupid pun ?

[theefer]

I mean, the stupid "Happy Bugday" pun hasn't even been mentioned yet ?

That probably would be a good idea

[sheWhoWalksWithToesL]

Melonman brings up a good point. With a bug scale, one would be able to tell just how necessary it was to install a patch.

Red Alert - "You've probably already been hacked, but install this anyway"

Yellow Alert - "Quick, install this before anyone notices you're worth hacking"

Green Alert - "Some extra features we couldn't finish before having to release our software"

I nice prize would be...

[ciupmean]

A generic and minimum linux dist (lfs alike) wich would run from the CD, configured the net and launched mozilla 1.0...

Re: IE Monopoly

[bunratty]

except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development

I don't think the situation would be any different today if Mozilla 1.0 had been released in say 1999. IE is preinstalled on nearly all desktop computers shipped, and nearly all users will not download another browser if there's a working browser already on the computer. That's why IE has well over 90% of page hits, not because of any flaw in any other browser.

A dumb idea..or not

[sheWhoWalksWithToesL]

Actually, it sounds to me like it is a cool way of very quickly finding out a whole mess of things users believe is wrong with the software. They must be very determined to improve it if they are willing to sift through all the silly bug posts for the real bugs. One wishes Microsoft would do the same..... But M$ doesn't really care, do they?

Brilliant pre-emptive strike, guys!

[dave-fu]

Curious that another fluff story about X00,000 bugs (haven't I seen this before?) in Mozilla is front-page news the same day that The Register reports just how many critical bugs Mozilla 1.0.1 (and one information leak that's persisted over to 1.1) and previous are shipping with. DoS? XSS? HTTPS flaws? Oh, they're in there.
If this was IE we were talking about, that would mean six more front page news postings (at least) but since this is Mozilla we're talking about, we get the fluff piece here giving the old reacharound to the Mozilla team and ignore the other glaring flaws.
Not that there ever were any glaring flaws because open source is more powerful and everyone checks all the source code before they compile, right?

Re:Brilliant pre-emptive strike, guys!

[ceejayoz]

Considering that Mozilla 1.1 is out and Mozilla 1.2 beta is out, you might as well complain about bugs in IE 1.0 while you're at it.

I win!!

[Tom7]

bug 178,326 ... "There are not 200,000 bugs in Bugzilla"
bug 178,327 ... "There are not 200,000 bugs in Bugzilla" (closed - DUP bug 178326)
bug 178,328 ... "There are not 200,000 bugs in Bugzilla" (closed - DUP bug 178326)

...

bug 200,000 ... "PROFIT"

Please don't spam the database

[Gerv]

Given some of the above comments, this needs saying. This is a fun contest, and the prize is small. Anyone who tries to spam the database in any way will only mean that we can't have this fun any more. So please don't. And it won't work anyway, because we'll notice and stop you.

If you have an automatic bug creation script, please point it at Landfill, the Bugzilla test installation, which needs all the test bugs it can get :-)

Gerv

Re:I love mozilla - Phoenix too!

[mark_lybarger]

but won't run on Redhat 6.1 like Opera will. :-(

comeon now. if you've got a box that NEED to be running RH 6.1, i'd question the need for a web browser (outside of _maybe_ lynx). if you need a web browser on the box, get with the times. the upgrade cd's are relatively cheep, chances are someone will send um to you if you can't download/burn the iso's.

pheonix is based on the mozilla core w/ all the extras ripped out (email, irc, composer, etc). there's times for those features

Speaking of bugs...

[MacAndrew]

Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering and free beer/speech (neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?) but cleaner and faster than the competition IMHO. Give it a try. Its own Bugzilla bug reporting makes for a sort of amusing read, if you're idle. Same problem, lots of redundant bugs or "whoops my machine was messed up" or "gee, wouldn't it be great for you to work your tail off for free to deliver this obscure feature."

Bugs can wear you out, the Web is still pretty raw. Now, I didn't want this mention of Chimera to be redundant, so I searched Slashdot first and got:

Searching For: chimera
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:42:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80

Re:Speaking of bugs...

[Tet]

Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering

I'm still stunned that someone was brainless enough to name this Chimera. Surely even the most basic of Google checks would have found that there's already another web browser called Chimera. I used to use it many years ago on machines for which Netscape was too bloated.

Re:Speaking of bugs...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?

HA! I had that exact same though a few weeks ago!

Well....not quite. I was thinking free beech or free speer. Not sure which one I prefer.

It was then, that I realised I was indeed, a true geek.

Mozilla 1.0 CD

[dousette]

Man, if someone got the Mozilla 1.0 CD, they could post it on the internet so we could ALL enjoy Mozilla..... oh, wait, they already do.... ;^)

California Sunday 10:02 A.M

[bxbaser]

Or it could be
California Sunday 10:04 A.M

200,000?

[sharkey]

Is that when it catches up to the Internet Explorer bug count?

Re:200,000?

[stevenp]

By that time (June 5-th 2003), IE will be much further AND if MS opens the IE API (as the settlement has set) AND the people see the garbage inside, then there is no chance that Mozilla can catch in terms of bug numbers.

Oh, I forgot, IE has no bug database :(

Re:200,000?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, all Microsoft programmers are incompetent. Funny how most of them were picked from the best OS programmers...

And all of a sudden

[dubbayu_d_40]

All bug reports stopped as everyone withheld theirs to win the prize...

How is this news?

[mvonballmo]

You made a whole Slashdot post out of an event that isn't coming for at least 200 days (going with the average of number of bugs per day so far)?

Must be a really slow news day.

dreaming

[claude_juan]

i do hope i get the prize bug! i can already see myself buying a special petroleum free casing for my moz 1.0 cd to preserve it. it will look so nice next to my baseball cards and sealed copy of windows xp.

just between you and me, i'm really bettin the farm that the xp collectible value takes off!

You would, too!

[Inoshiro]

I betcha you have something faster than the 14,400 kbps modem us Netscape 0.9 users had! 300k is still 3 minutes at 14.4 speeds.

"Okay, it does take a bit longer, on that 14,400 kbps modem, but the Mosaic Communications people have developed it so the text on the pages loads before the pictures. That way, you have something to read while you wait for a picture to load. Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)"

Who'll be the lucky winner?

[ohboy-sleep]

but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla.

Also if the person with the 200,00th bug can name the song of the day he'll win two tickets to see Styx live at The Meadowlands.

BUG REPORT

[Alsee]

BUG REPORT:
------------------

Mozilla's 200,000th bug competition is causing an excessive number of false bug reports.

Status: Confirmed.
Severity: Serious.

-

bugs, features, and enhancements

[peter303]

Its a continuum between all three. One user's annoyance may be an intentional feature. It also may not be a serious failure, but a future enhancement . Because of this continnuum, a good support and development database puts all three together.

There are also may be duplication. The person updating the database may overlook a similar
bug or may not be sure it is the same. The same deep root cause may have a variety of manifestations.

The bug/enhacements databse is one of the most important software engineering tools. Its a good way to tie users, support, and developers together. It is a metric for progress in software stability.

Re:Mozilla

[jweatherley]

Five of which are already fixed. Contrast that to security flaws in IE which require you to install fixes with the shiny new BillG 0wNs j00 EULA. (Of course that's if MS deign to fix the bugs at all rather than get in a hissy fit with whomever exposed them)

talkback

[zogger]

--I used to send in the talkback report on netscape, but this mozilla I'm on, 1.01(I think, don't remember), where is it? I'll turn it on if I can find it. I found one that is definetly a reproducable bug, and I've also encounted things that lock moz down completely. The version moz I'm running is the update from rh 7.2 up2date. Thanks in advance.

200Kth BUG

[dakorman]

Get a life!!

I just cleaned out my garage and loaded the curb (for trash pick-up.. the city employees just love those hugh pickups) with stuff that someday MIGHT be worth something... anyway it sounds like the contest will be a fun thing. Since the code has gotten pretty solid lately we may have to wait a few years. Some of the stuff reported on Bugzilla is rather trivial. Watch out the lawyer types may get involved deciding what a bug is or isn't. (Similar to Bill C's. 'it depends on what the meaning of is is')

Duplicates

[MCZapf]

Bugzilla needs an easier way to search for duplicate bugs.

I reported a Mozilla bug once. I tried to search for duplicates, but have you seen that god-awful search form that Bugzilla has? I must have done the search wrong, because it turns out there were several duplicates.

Big waste of everyone's time, because someone had to analyze my bug report before they noticed it was a dupe.

Re:Duplicates

[Jucius Maximus]

"Bugzilla needs an easier way to search for duplicate bugs. I reported a Mozilla bug once. I tried to search for duplicates, but have you seen that god-awful search form that Bugzilla has? I must have done the search wrong, because it turns out there were several duplicates."

I agree. I've reported about 5 bugs (after searching for previous reports) and 3 of them still ended up being dupes. It's either that or we don't know how to use the bugzilla search engine.

I hightly doubt it....

[WD]

You're assuming that the number of bugs filed per day is nearly constant, which is not the case. As the browser gains popularity, more and more people are filing bugs. (Which are more and more duplicate or invalid bugs, mind you....)

As much as I hate to link to MQ, here is a chart from just over a year ago showing the number of bugs filed. Assuming Mangelo has enough brain cells to do a proper graph, I think you can see the trend....

not 200,000 bugs?

[dwater]

> (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been
> reported, there are not - and have not been - that
> many bugs in Mozilla.)"

What? I am *positive* there are still bugs in mozilla. How the hell would they know how much bugs are left? There could easily be 200,000 bugs, since you can never say s/w (especially as complex as mozilla) is bug free - they will just keep on popping up. All they can say is that they haven't found that many - yet.

Max.

Re:not 200,000 bugs?

[Vann_v2]

I think his point was that all those reported bugs aren't actually bugs. Some are feature requests, some are duplicates, some aren't bugs in Mozilla, some can't be replicated, and so on. Because these sorts of things are allowed, any large project using bugzilla will quickly have their "bug count" balloon up.

True! but...

[MacAndrew]

The formal name of the browser product is "Navigator" -- even more annoying. Chimera is the name of the GPL project -- I don't know what they had in mind, but can't keep it because Chimera wouldn't give them permission (I assume trademark). The name game comes up often on their message board, and I'm sure they'd welcome our suggestions (not).

Verion 1.0 would be a nice time to pick a real name. Many have been proposed. My least favorite, iGuana (get it -- "gecko"?).

Something novel ... hmmm ... how about "Xplorer"?? Or "It Works Better Than It Sounds"?

aol v. mozilla cds.

[MadLibs]

The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day

greeeeeeaaaat. so that one cd can hang around with my 200,000 AOL cds i have floating around.....

Re:200,000? Is that all!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your running the Windows version of Mozilla, aren't you?

Those aren't Mozilla bugs =)

True geek...

[MacAndrew]

...that's good, right?

Well, we all need that hybrid word. I guess we have one: free.

He's not a troll, you're an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

IE is perfect, it never crashes and its fast. Mozzila is a piece of shit and only gay zealots use it. Argue with me, I dare you.

Wouldn't it be perfect...

[Joey7F]

If the 200,000th bug was an oversight of an FAQ?

--Joey

-1, Troll. Didn't get it, eh?

[Qbertino]

You didn't get the joke, did you?

Things IE can't do #16

[Knightmare]

I want to know how to access this feature:
Bookmarks can be downloaded at a certain schedule
One can set bookmarks to be checked at various schedules and notify when the content has changed. At least, in theory.

I think this one may be BS due to the in theory part. And the title should be changed to things Mozilla hopes to do that IE can't. Either that or it's another case of me just missing a menu in the config, if anybody knows about this one please fill me in.

Thanks!

Godel's theorem

[Anonymous Coward]

Given any piece of software, there are some bugs which are simply undiscoverable.

- a.c.

Offtopic, but...

[forged]

...whatever happened to your girlfriend ?

Re:Offtopic, but...

[Elbereth]

Haha. She listens to Tori Amos 24/7 and overidentifies with every song. Last I heard, she has about as much of a life as me -- ie, none.

Last Post!

[alpg]

Alan Cox wrote:
>> On any procmail new enough not to be full of security holes you set
>Brain on, Imeant majordomo of course 8)
You got me worried there for a brief (very brief) moment :-).
-- Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless)

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...