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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.
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 ?
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.
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.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
then keep fast in your refusal. your refusal does not change that 90% of users cannot do it. leave aside the fact that there not being any reason for EXPECTING them to do it, by fucking up a software. 'hey we fucked up working stuff - then spend YOUR time to fix these, instead of spending your time on YOUR work you need to do'.
people just switch.
Read radical news here
Problems with bug triage and inflation aren't just a Firefox problem. Gentoo's bugzilla reports 1557 bugs in state UNCONFIRMED and over 5k NEW bugs. RHEL5 has 2276 bugs in state NEW. Ubuntu has over 50k bugs in state NEW across all releases. Microsoft once let slip that Windows 2000 had over 63k known bugs. Bugs languishing in an open state for a long time is a recognised problem, but nobody really has a good answer. Ubuntu's automated periodic "is this fixed yet?" posts and followup bug closures on no response is one way to do it, but there is definitely room for improvement.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You are on a rapid release - we are NOT. Which means we are dropping FF support both internally and from supported browsers for our products. You made traditional QA impossible and support too expensive.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
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.
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.