Firefox Ships with 6000 Potential Bugs, Community Lead Departs | ConceivablyTech

Mozilla does not discuss product problems behind closed doors and employees as well key contributors rarely sugarcoat their opinions. A blog post published by Community Lead Tyler Downer rocks Mozilla as he claims that Mozilla Triage QA process is broken and he believes that the current rapid release process drowns Firefox in a sea of bugs with no land in sight.

Downer recently left Mozilla as Community Lead (“for the time being”), which gives him considerable influence in the pre-sorting process of bugs (triage) that are reported by the Mozilla community. In a post that explains the reasons for his departure, he voices frustration with Mozilla that there is not attention that is paid to triaging bugs. According to Downer, there are currently 5934 (unconfirmed) bugs in the shipping version of Firefox. He noted that of those almost 6000 bugs, 2598 have not been touched over the past 150 days (since the launch of Firefox 4).

“In Spring 2010, we hit roughly 13,000 [unconfirmed] bugs in Firefox. 13,000!!! We currently have 5934,” Downer writes. […] “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. Oh, and Mozilla is run by the community.’” This list of almost 6000 bugs is apparently growing every day: 27 bugs were reported in just 24 hours during this weekend.

He added: “Now, I realize that it is impossible to touch every bug immediately, but, to those who have gone the extra mile to create a BMO account, file out the bug report form, and navigate BMO emails just to report something they feel is important, don’t we owe at least a little common courtesy?”

Downer suggested that Mozilla will need at least “1-3 people to just handle Triage on an Official Full-Time capacity.” Triage at Mozilla is currently done by volunteers.

Can Mozilla afford to employ triage staff or can it afford to simply drop triage? Downer believes that Mozilla will have to react and says that he considers a return if Mozilla is taking his complaint seriously. “Without long-term changes, I feel that triage is going to be facing a larger and larger pile of bugs that doesn’t go down, and eventually may just go away out of frustration,” he wrote. “I hope to see some sort of improvement in Triage, and when I do, I will jump right back in. But as it is, I see no use in contributing to a project that seems to have gained little attention from Mozilla. No, there is no glamor in Triage. But neither is there any glamor in 20,000 [unconfirmed] bugs.”

A commenter to Downer’s post, who described himself as a Firefox Nightly user and community member, added to the post and wrote that some bugs sit for years before they are closed. He linked to one particularly spicy example that is nearly 12 years old and goes 5 years beyond the initial release of Firefox 1.0. This bug is still listed as “new” today.

Mozilla has not officially responded to Downer’s post yet.

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Source: http://www.conceivablytech.com