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Mar 22

That Firefox 3 Bug “Rumor”

Posted in: Firefox 3, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

Firefox Bug 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% ?)