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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 ?
Oh how the times have changed. For info about QA for Netscape 4.0, see this short refresher course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarro_boogs
--- cut here --
The following comment is provided in the Bugzilla source code to developers who may be confused by this behaviour: ... way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn't actually happened. (This is not unique to Netscape or to 4.0; the same thing has happened with every software project I've ever seen.) Anyway, at the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro Boogs". Just like the software, the T-shirt had no known bugs. Uh-huh. So, when you query for a list of bugs, and it gets no results, you can think of this as a friendly reminder. Of *course* there are bugs matching your query, they just aren't in the bugsystem yet...
Zarro Boogs Found
This is just a goofy way of saying that there were no bugs found matching your query. When asked to explain this message, Terry Weissman (an early Bugzilla developer) had the following to say:
I've been asked to explain this
--Terry Weissman
Mozilla has no such position as "Community Lead". Tyler was/is (he is still engaged in constructive discussion) a valued volunteer member of the Mozilla QA and triage community, but he does not have the title "Community Lead".
There are several things which Mozilla's new more rapid release process has made a bit rocky, as Johnathan Nightingale, the Firefox development manager, noted in a recent blog post (syndicated at the Future of Firefox blog). This is one of them.
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. And clearly, it's not great when a bug report is filed and just sits there for months. Mozilla's success has made this a perennial problem for the last decade. We've cracked it, to a degree, before and I'm sure we can do it again.
Just to clear some things up and possibly prevent irrelevant posts...
This has nothing to do with the rapid-release; he states in the 2nd paragraph that
First off, I did not leave because of rapid release. I love the idea of rapid release, and I think the recent spurt of posts to the planet on how Rapid Release will be beneficial in the long run does a great job of explaining it.
His issue is that Triage isnt good enough for rapid release-- not that rapid-release doesnt work with Triage (but thanks for stirring the muck, anonymous reader / soulskill).
But Id like a clarification-- if there were 13,000 bugs 15 months ago, and now there are 6000, doesnt that speak to massive improvement? Why not leave back in spring 2010?
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.
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.
In a related story, from this point forward "Debbie Downer" is no longer the correct pseudonym for an overtly depressing person. Hereafter, that person shall be cited as "Tyler Downer".
All hail our new horribly sad overlord.
As 13 years are not enough to handle a major bug.
They are focusing on HTML5 (which is not a standard but a draft) and leave HTML4 implementation with all existing bugs.
They think that all web pages will be rewritten in HTML5 as soon as it will land as real standard. It will instead take years.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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.
For a product that allegedly has 6000 bugs, I don't encounter very many,
Well, 6000 unconfirmed bug reports. As pointed out elsewhere, this includes "my internetz don't work", duplicates, feature requests, and complaints the UX team is on crack.
This is down from 13000.
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.
Seems quite user friendly. [end of the irony]
Now I hope you can explain me:
Seriously, release early and often, but 6 months is enough for most people. Or at least do minor and major releases. Then the version X will be the rock solid one, and the X+1-pre1 (or something more appealing coming from marketing) could be for early adopters and enthusiasts.
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.
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
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.
You mean for about a week or two?
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.
"What's xpi? Is that a new Windows?"
It's always confirmation bias!
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
You are thinking like a nerd, not a computer user. I did not know this information, so I was one of those 90% people until today. And you would be surprised how many people are using FireFox but could not possibly do this. Yes, even with step by step instructions.
"I refuse to believe that 90% of car owners cannot change their own oil." That statement makes as much sense as yours. Maybe they could, but they won't, and don't think they should.
Lots of people wiped their parents/friends/neighbors computers because of their inability to understand anything at all, getting viruses and popups and toolbars and whatnot. And they put Firefox on, and said "there, use that, that's the internet." Those people will click any update box, any OK button just to "make the damned thing go away." They will not update a text file inside a zip, or if they try they will not do it correctly.
"Just associate .zip files with WinZip" you say. I wish we had known when we set people up to use Firefox that this was coming, or we might have.
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, 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.
>In Spring 2010, we hit roughly 13,000 UNCO bugs in the Firefox product on BMO.
Don't blame this shit on me.
--
BMO
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.
And how does this work for signed plugins and extensions?
Basically, bugs have a lifecycle - they may start out UNCOnfirmed, move to confirmed, then in progress, then resolved and finally rest in verified.
I used to do volunteer triage for Mozilla back in 2000 (folks like Gerv, Timeless and Asa probably don't remember me though ;). I even have an old out of date page called kill-unco.
However the reality is that there a lot of people filing bugs at a rate that is very high. Generally speaking there are not enough people to look at bugs at the best of times and this leads to a never ending amount of work. Bugs that poorly written, bugs that need to be followed up, bugs that are feature requests, bugs that are old and really difficult to fix and so on all take up vast amounts of time.
To handle this, people looking at bugs need to spend less time (or magically grow in number) in order to handle the ever increasing load. However being terse can lead to its own problems and the inevitable fall out occurs. The person in this blog post seems to be saying "Triagers are people too! We need more people doing triage full time" but the reality is this situation has existed since the beginning. Triage is a thankless, unfashionable task and the better you do it the more work you attract. It does teach how to write a really good bug report though :)
Mozilla's objective should be to release great software, not to close bug reports. In fact, if they can release the software while touching fewer bug reports, that's more efficient.
The problem is that Mozilla continues to be careless about setting their community's expectations (on other issues too). They solicit bug reports from people, who invest time and effort in reporting, testing, following up, and even patching -- but then Mozilla does nothing with the bugs. It's disrespectful to use people's time like that.
Mozilla needs to set expectations clearly from the start: Feel free to report it, triage it, patch it, etc., but realize that most bug reports are never implemented.
>> "Please stop pretending that Firefox is some piss-poor, bug-addled, sub-standard product..."
I'm not pretending. Did you RTFA? The head of bug triage quit because mozilla isn't managing bug fixes. It's a pretty damning statement from someone in the loop.
>> "And please stop pretending that most people will drop it just because a shiny new toy comes around.. they won't."
I've been a Mozilla/Firefox user since it became available on Linux. IIRC that was shortly after my first distro RedHat 5.1. I don't say any of this out of hate, I do so from concern.
I too find it annoying when people blindly criticize the old and bask on the new, that's not what people are doing with FF. The update schedule has become frantic to the point where there might be a new release by the time I hit submit on this post. It is difficult to believe due diligence is being done toward bug testing. This feels like "Go fever", and that almost never ends well.
But doesn't the mozilla foundation make millions of dollars per year? Can't they afford a team of dedicated engineers to close out these bugs? This isn't some scrappy open source project anymore. It's making serious money which begs the question .... where is that money going?
I moved all of my personal and business machines to Chrome months ago because of everything that you described. We still have IE as a fallback for crappy government web sites that require IE. After moving to Chrome, I'm still kicking myself for not getting rid of the headache that Firefox became much earlier than I did. This is one of those cases when I feel that the lack of a top down organizational structure has really hurt the final product. Management by committee rarely works out well.
I don't respond to AC's.
Add-ons are the reason people use Firefox. Decisions are made that break Firefox Add-ons, without notice.
Firefox is extremely important because it is the only browser that has such an extensive list of add-ons. (Unfortunately, Add-ons are also called "extensions" and "plug-ins".) For some uses, the add-ons are so convenient that they can be considered necessary.
Firefox instability corrupts the Windows operating system. There is huge instability seen only by people who open many windows and tabs, and leave them open for a long time. (It is not necessary to say you don't experience this bug if you don't commonly have 30 or more windows with 100 or more tabs open for several hours. Those of us who must do research have needs different than the average user.) That particular Firefox instability has been there since version 1, perhaps 10 years ago. An example: Two days ago I had a crash in Firefox version 6.0 that did not generate a Talkback report.
Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs (Last updated in 2009.)
Here are the top 20 things Firefox and Mozilla developers say to those who report difficult bugs, collected over the last 8 years. See also the extensive information provided in this Slashdot comment, Firefox is the most unstable program in common use, and the links in the comment.
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.
it was well publicised that windows 2000 had 65,000 known bugs when released
Sheesh, couldn't they have found another 536 bugs to make it a nice round number?
The picture you paint may seem rosy to you, but it is not attractive most people IMO. The good news is, reality is even better than you think it is.
If the add-on developer hosts the add-on on addons.mozilla.org (AMO), the browser will check with AMO to see if the extension is compatible when the browser starts; if so, the maxVersion of the extension is *automatically* bumped.
The extension compatilibity is determined through automated analysis, and the *vast* majority of updates work properly this way. The update bump normally happens some time around the second week of Aurora; it is possible that *you* need to edit your XPI files by hand because you are on the beta channel, but that is *not* the expected end-user experience.
End users should almost always find out that extensions hosted on AMO "just work"
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/05/21/firefox-5-compatibility-bump/ :
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
You are thinking like a nerd, not a computer user. I did not know this information, so I was one of those 90% people until today. And you would be surprised how many people are using FireFox but could not possibly do this. Yes, even with step by step instructions.
"I refuse to believe that 90% of car owners cannot change their own oil." That statement makes as much sense as yours. Maybe they could, but they won't, and don't think they should.
Lots of people wiped their parents/friends/neighbors computers because of their inability to understand anything at all, getting viruses and popups and toolbars and whatnot. And they put Firefox on, and said "there, use that, that's the internet." Those people will click any update box, any OK button just to "make the damned thing go away." They will not update a text file inside a zip, or if they try they will not do it correctly.
"Just associate .zip files with WinZip" you say. I wish we had known when we set people up to use Firefox that this was coming, or we might have.
Its more like saying "I refuse to believe that 90% of car owners don't know how to set the correct gap on their spark plugs."
Car owners know that they the oil in a car can be changed. Car owners know that the oil in their car should be changed. Car owners may even know that some of the steps involved in changing oil include removing old oil and pouring new oil in, but may not know the precise amount or that the filter should be changed as well.
Some car owners don't even know what a spark plug is, much less were they are or how to pull them out. And very few of them know that the gap can matter, much less what it should be and how to set it.
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'.