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Updated: Mozilla Community Contributor Departs Over Bug Handling

Posted by Soulskill on from the ways-in-which-mozilla-is-like-a-new-york-apartment dept.

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.

4 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. FF was good, then... by matt007 · · 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 ?

    1. Re:FF was good, then... by 0123456 · · 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.

  2. This problem has infected so many FOSS projects by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  3. Too many open bugs? by Ant+P. · · 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.