RSSMozilla: Firefox 3 bug claim 'horses**t'
By Ed Oswald | Published 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.
IE7 sux, this publicitystunt must be made by someone associated with microshaft
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|It will be fine. Everyone going to jump ship on this upcoming version and go back to IE 7. You must be kidding.
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|back to IE7? LOL
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|IE7 is not bad compared to no-add on version of Firefox.
But firefox does let you customize it enough to go way beyond IE7 in my opinion.
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|Why the quibbling over something that hasn't even been released into public use yet. Bugs don't matter at the moment. When we get it and use it is when it matters and not before. As long it is usable at time of release without glaring bugs that should have been fixed. I can live with a few bugs as all programs have bugs, some just not as evident as others.
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|Jesus, this is how software is built. Tickets are raised, dealt with, prioritised, closed. That's why we have debuggers and the stack trace. They've delivered FF and FF2 which are good enough for everyday browsing. It's not like Mozilla are suddenly going to forget how to build a release for FF3.
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|"Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler"
Point me to one single patch written by Asa Dotzler for Mozilla Firefox, because he is most certainly not a developer!
See also: http://weblogs.mozillazi...11/what_im_up_to_t.html
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|motherfukcing horsesiht!
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|sounds like there's trouble with FF, I don't mind a delay in release, I'm happy with FF2.
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|Yeah I'll second that. And it gives extension developers more time to update their stuff. As it stands now, only about 5 out of the 30 extensions I use are compatible with the latest build of FF3.
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|"We've already fixed over 11,000 bugs and features in Firefox 3" - that's the horses***, you have CLOSED 11,000 bugs, absolute majority of them with "won't fix" or some similar resolution.
I understand the lack of time and resources, and I understand that less than ideal release is better than no release at all. Just stop lying to us.
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|No, that's the actual number of RESOLVED/VERIFIED FIXED bugs. It's not counting bugs with any other resolution.
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|Frankly, Asa Dotzler is correct - while "only 20%" of the current 700 bugs may, in fact, be fixed by release, this does not mean that "20% of the bugs within firefox 3 will be fixed".
Why? Because, as Dotzler said, they've already fixed over 11,000 bugs. 20% of 700, or 140, means that they will have 560 unfixed.
560/11,700 does not equal 20%. Not even close.
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|It's awesome you can say horses*** in your post but I can't say it in my comment...
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|The best part is it is censored in the title but not the article.
Censoring a quoted line is kinda BS though and thats proly why it was allowed.
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|And they don't want to offend with the article's title. Hence, the censoring.
Welcome to journalism.
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|Yes, in the interest of good taste, it was censored in the headline so it doesn't appear in RSS.
But in the main part of the story, we did not censor it. If the language was a bit more colorful, it would have been censored in both places. Always a fine line, I guess..
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|Weren't there articles doing the rounds at the time of Windows... 2000 (Has it really been that long?! ;)) release stating that it'd ship with 10000+ bugs... Is the existence of a multitude of bugs really that interesting? Perhaps if they were critical & in a "final" public release they would, but in a pre-beta Browser? Pfff.
Outlandish as the following may sound; I "suspect" Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc. may just have bugs too.
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|Difference is that Windows 2000 was a full operating system and this is just a browser which kind of puts things into a better perspective. It's even more relevent when the browser is one that sells itself on its improved security and stability over Internet Explorer.
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|My intention wasn't to compare a Browser to an Operating System :) The fact is everything has bugs; & pointing out arbitrary numbers is somewhat irrelevant.
Besides, how many of these unresolved "bugs" are security / stability related? Many aren't even "bugs" as most would define them; e.g. 231062 "Provide Firefox MSI package".
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|Of course if this was Microsoft, everyone would take it as the gospel and jump on the boat to start bashing them. This is typical software development. All software ships with bugs. If it didn't, there wouldn't be any updates or fixes for the software.
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|The issue there is that it was 65000 bugs in Windows. That's a much more frightening number than 700. :P
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|That may be true, but how many more lines of code are there in Windows compared to Firefox? Also - what's the percentage of bugs to lines of code?
If you have 2 million lines of code and 700 bugs and I have 150 million lines of code and 65000 bugs. I'm thinking that I'm doing a better job percentage wise.
One thing to keep in mind too is what defines a bug. When Windows 95 released - there were some 35000 known "bugs" that went unrepaired. When looking at the list of what was left alone, it was typos in dialogs, icons that could have been better justified or colors that were off. There was some doozeys, it wasn't perfect. But a "bug" by any other name... :)
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|could be worse. could be running ahead of schedule and be released like netscape 4, 5, or *gasp* 6. better late and prepared than early and unprepared. they have a reputation to uphold and at the same time improve upon. there is a lot of competition in the browser market now with safari and opera both being free, competent, cross platform competitors.
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|This is a good example of why you never look to mainstream media outlets for technology news. They rarely get it right.
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