Mozilla has been taking some heat the past few days because of a post by Computer World’s Gregg Keizer. In it he quoted the latest Firefox 3 Meeting notes saying that 80% of the Firefox 3 bugs will not get fixed by the time the browser is released.
It is true that Mozilla, in one of their plans, had said that they would leave 80% of the bugs in the browser, but there was nothing set in stone. Their meeting notes were essentially a brainstorming session where they were tossing ideas around. One of the disadvantages of operating an open source organization is that they can’t really discuss ideas without the public being clued in. The Quality Assurance leader, Asa Dotzler, called Keizer’s claim “simply horseshit.” He said that they have “already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we’re discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues.“
The truth of the matter is that they can’t possibly fix every single bug that is found before they release the next version of Firefox, otherwise it would never get released. The subsequent releases of Firefox are what’s supposed to fine tune the browser.
The meeting notes have since been edited, and the guilty section has been removed. I’ve copied the missing sections below so that you can see what was said, particularly in “proposal 2″:
Beta 2 criteria, proposal 1
- Should go in for beta 2:
- Bugs likely to cause regressions — it is better to land risky patches for beta 2 than later!
- Bugs that prevent many users from browsing the web on a daily basis
- Security issues
- Top crashers
- Can go in for beta 2:
- Memory leaks
- Performance issues
- Major regressions from Firefox 2
- Functionality in support of a P1 PRD item (?)
Beta 2 criteria, proposal 2
[...]
- Should go in for beta 2:
- The 10% most important blockers
- Anything risky (likely to cause regressions) among the next 10% most important blockers
- Should go in for beta 3:
- The next 10% most important blockers
- Should be cut from Firefox 3:
- New features that have not gone in yet.
- Any patch with too much risk of regressions to go in at the beginning of the beta 2 cycle (because there will never be a safer time to land them)
- The rest of the “blockers” (80% ?)
lol they’re kidding right? they expect people to just be okay with dealing with a buggy browser just because “it’s not IE” ? Mozilla is definitely on the wrong way here!
And hey what did they do with all the Google money?! print those cool “spread firefox” tshirts :S ?
Read this:
The Quality Assurance leader, Asa Dotzler, called Keizer’s claim “simply horseshit.” He said that they have “already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we’re discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues.“
How many bugs does IE have?
Some people do not believe that there has been that many bug fixes behind the development of Firefox 3.0 already as because they are not willing to see for themselves or do not realize that Firefox 3.0 was already being worked on for sometime now while still on the Trunk (at least 15+ months). A lot of the regular testers believe the earliest Firefox 3.0 will be released is close to say March so it is not like they have only a couple weeks to fix all some 700 so called blockers. The devs are not the only ones that can fix the bugs as people who are familiar with certain parts and such can help submit patches that can be used or to get the ball rolling for a proper patch.
“”How many bugs does IE have?”"
A few million give or take 100,1000 …J/K ..MS does have the extra hurdle with IE being part of the OS though.
I would never return to IE after Firefox. Still I’m almost certain IE has less bugs than Firefox.
The only reason I stay with Firefox is the speed and the use of extensions.
There are probably a large amount of bugs in IE, but that was one of the things that I tried to stress in the article. When programs are not open source it is much easier for the community to criticize the progress, because they see it along every step of the way.
Especially that the browser is essentially feature complete by this point. From now on out the focus is performance, bugs, and tidying up the existing features.
I’m skeptical of IE having less bugs than Firefox, especially after launching a completely redesigned browser the last time around. Big changes mean lots of bugs.
Tristan Nitot (president of Mozilla Europe) wrote an interesting article about those “bugs”. Bottom line : when you hear a developer talking about “bugs”, he might be talking about features, changes or tweaks to the program. Not necessarily the nasty and potentially dangerous bugs everyone thinks about. Read it here :
[standblog.org]
That’s a good point, as a developer myself I know I have done the same thing.