Mozilla: Firefox 3 bug claim 'horses**t'

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

November 16, 2007, 12:55 PM

Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler used the term to describe his feelings toward a claim that it is bypassing as many as eight out of every 10 Firefox bugs.

A story in the New York Times Thursday by IDG analyst Gregg Keizer claimed that only 20 percent of the bugs within Firefox 3 would be fixed by the time it will be released next year.

Apparently some 700 bugs are currently marked as "blockers" -- issues that are bad enough to warrant postponing a release. The company said this is too much, and said that developers need to prioritize what bugs are most important.

He pulled the 80 percent number from Mozilla documents themselves, so the number was not created by Keizer. However it apparently was enough to set Dotzler off.

"That claim is simply horseshit," he wrote in a blog post. "We've already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3 and now we're discussing how to handle the remaining 700 issues we wanted to get fixed for Firefox 3."

To Mozilla's defense, any security-related problem will be rated "important," and any issue that could prevent day-to-day browsing of the web is moved to the front of the line. But hundreds of other bugs could viably ship with the new release of the browser.

At least two betas are expected, with a third possible if Mozilla is not comfortable with the quality of the release. Firefox 3 in total looks to be running about a quarter of a year behind previously stated release goals.