Mozilla will not fix Firefox 3.0 beta

When the hell did Mozilla turn into Microsoft?

not that I doubt the inquirers sensationalistic reporting ... but considering how poor the later versions of firefox have been stability wise I'll be concerned for the future. OTOH, I'd love to know the amount of bugs that remain unfixed and known in Internet Explorer. Something Microsoft has no incentive to disclose, people forget about that.

Releasing software with many bugs. So they finally decided to do it the same way M$ is doing it.

Firefox 1.5 was the last stable release of firefox in my opinion. Firefox 2.0.0.X seems to be getting worse and worse with each release (yes I'm running the latest) and now this? Almost enough to drive you back to IE6.

Why should I be bothered to install it then?

Looks like the Mozilla Foundation is a great success. After all, they've just adopted the Microsoft way of making products : get loads of bugs, and correct a small part of them release by release, one patch Tuesday at a time. Well, as much as I like Firefox 2.009, it seems to me that I'll be passing on 3.xxx until I hear that ALL bugs have been fixed. There are always bugs. It's unavoidable given the current climate of development. The least they could do is release a product free of any known bugs, in order for us users to only worry about the unknown ones.

Hey, I have that tattoo!

Alpha,Beta test phases is all about detection and fixing of bugs. If they want to release a buggy product to the public then why waiting? And what is the purpose of having Beta testing if you don't use it to fix bugs ? If a project has too many bugs to get fixed it should get discarded and redone from scratch. Instead Mozilla is just going to do what Microsoft always does, release a buggy unfinished Beta product to the public.

Inspite of however many bugs it has, Firefox will still be the best browser available. Firefox is the only major browser which is open source. For all you know, Opera and Safari have 2000 bugs a piece and IE has 5000. Besides, it is not in the Mozilla Foundation's interest to release bad software, they will make it as good as they can.

"...word from on high is that developers should only fix 20 per cent of the bugs before the final version is released next year". So now Mozilla is striving to emulate the Vole's quality standards. It's a tall order...

Mr. Ballmer: You see, Mr. Open Source, we're not so different, you and I. You want to get a release out the door, I want to get a release out the door. You claim that your model allows you to fix bugs automagically, but you really don't like fixing bugs any more than I do. Mr. Open Source: No, that's not true! We'll never be the same! Mr Ballmer: Oh yes, Mr. Open Source, you are in my court now.

like vista!

The only difference with this and any other software development is mozilla lets us see which bugs it's lauching with whilst normally you dont get to see which known bugs software is launching with.

Guess what, EVERYONE* does it that way. You never fix all the bugs you know about. You fix as many as you can before the release date, the most important almost always getting fixed asap. Low end bugs almost always get in. They are just too time consuming. *Everyone - all software, games, OS, apps you name it.

... All and every software released with KNOWN bugs, no news here. Somewhere important bugs called "blockers", somewhere "regressions", whatever developers choose to call them. Smaller programs shipped with fewer bugs, bigger ones with more. And firefox is by all means *huge* pice of code. So what this article is about?

It seems entirely clear that the author of this article has never been involved in any kind of sensible release management processes. Release management always involves analysing the list of problems currently believed to be blockers and working out which of them actually *are* blockers justifying delaying release until development time is available to fix them - which is not necessarily the same as the list that has been given a high priority by module owners, aggrieved users, etc. People do occasionally get upset about having their bugs downgraded, but most of them recognise that it's merely a matter of prioritising development time. I wouldn't do it by means of percentages myself, but then I'm not particularly involved in the Mozilla project. (However, I have been release manager for two major Linux distributions, so I do have some experience here.)

Why don't they act a little more mature and simply tell people that it'll be released "when it's done"? It's not like they've got to rush it in order to compete with Microsoft or something. The last thing they need is to have their product be known to be "half-baked" like certain other products out on the market.

It's the browser with the highest complexity in it. Just take a look at the CSS compliance (IE is the worst one)

Why don't they push back the release date like they did with KDE. I'd prefer to wait a little longer than to get a buggy product.

I'm guessing most of the whiners that have already posted (including the author of this inflammatory article) have never done software development on a large project. First, not all bugs are created equal. "Visiting google.com crashes browser" is more significant than "I think the dialog box for obscure option xyz should be 10 pixels wider". Second, all complex software, and most trivial software, has "bugs" (in quotes because as I just stated, you can define a bug to be anything that you don't like), bugs that the author knows about. Why? Because otherwise nothing would ever be released. So long as release (n+1) is marginally better than release n, it is still an upgrade. Perfection is not a goal. Third, rather than falling for this stirring of the pot, go to the developer blogs for firefox and you'll find a much more mature and informative appraisal of what the release criteria are.

Welcome to the garbage software club Mozilla! I would have expected more quality once you got more funding, but since we can't expect that from other similar companies, why should you be any different? Enjoy your ride until the next browser comes along.

A "bug" in Mozilla speak can be either a problem or a new feature request. Many of the bugs that aren't getting "fixed" are actually feature requests that were previously approved for Firefox 3, but are getting pushed back due to time constraints.

You do realize that Fixing 20% of outstanding bugs is not the same as fixing 10%, then another 10% of the remaining bugs (~19% of the originals)?

If Mozilla do not know what they have, i can understand. But They do know they have a uniq product, so i am really confused! If developers really are going to do as told, they are no longer developer of OS, they are just hired programmers. keld

Why is there a time constraint on releasing 3.0? Why is it more important to have a shiny new version number before Christmas than a working application? These artificial milestones annoy the crap out of me.

I think it's acceptable to release a public beta with 700 stoppers. Need to get more people interested in it. There will be beta 2, beta 3, then RC builds. It's no big deal if there is no stopper in the final release.

Hmm. Depends how you define bugs. Bugs on Bugzilla aren't necessarily problems, they can be things like wanted features, or suggestions for interface changes etc. Shame Nick didn't do some proper research before posting this. Basically this is just a copy/paste job from the linked site. Very BBC. There's quite a good explanation here: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2007/11/16/what-makes-firefox-3/ That's all...

700 bugs is one thing. 700 blocker bugs is a totally different animal. Blocker bugs, at least in my experience, usually are but a small portion of bugs in any software development cycle. This sounds like they don't have a good handle on what a "blocker" bug really is, or have little oversight over how users report their issues. There's a high change that each Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks the bug they've found is a "blocker", if they are willing to take the time to report it.

I think they should wait and fix the bugs, I'm not in a hurry for version 3 and I don't think no one is. Releasing a buggy product hits hard when you are number one. It means people are expecting the best or they simply change to another browser and that's worse...

"There are a number of blog posts out there, presumably based on the same Gregg Keizer article, that are claiming - Mozilla Won’t Fix 80% of Firefox 3.0’s Bugs That claim is simply horsesh**. 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." http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/11/ignorance_or_ma.html Anyone involved in software development will realise products ship with bugs. What has been taken out of context is the focus by Mozilla Corp. to fix the most important bugs. As with any product there are bugs in Firefox which date back to its inception, but because they're not very important - end users aren't affected by them, or won't use functionality they'll provide or correct - they won't be fixed.

Microsoft charges you to buy its OS, enforces buggy-home-calling-good-for-nothing-IE, Mozilla does not do the same for its browser. One sentance of advice. Do not judge a free given horses teeth. Oh another sentance of advice. addons.mozilla.org - might be handy if you want 3rd party software that fixes the browsers bugs in an alternative way. Cheers

Oh come on, who really thought Firefox would turn out any different. They've only ever been in it for the money, exploiting the poor deluded fools who worship it like a religion. Why don't they just hire Malcom MacLaren as their project manager and own up to the swindle.

Ok obviously the author is not a regular tester and has no idea how a bug system is ran at an open source project such as mozilla, so I will try to enlighten. First, anyone can create a bug, if you think that homepage.com loads slowly, you can open a bug. Second, everything is a bug, it is how the to-do list is tracked, to be as transparent to the public as possible. If moving the search bar one pixel to the left is proposed, a bug will be opened to track the idea. Bugs are prioritized to determine which are actually bugs and which are nice to haves/ enhancements. So never will all bugs be fixed, as many things will turn out to not need fixing.

Have you read some of the open bugs in 1.5.X / 2.X? eg "If the mouse is clicked 500 times whilst a USB key is inserted and the user starts windows calculator then the Firefox background briefly flashes" The fact that they acknowledge obscure bugs shows how much dev testing goes into such a product.

This story is more "buggy" than Firefox 3 will be. The 20% bug fix rumor was confirmed false by the Mozilla team. It was based on the fact that Mozilla groups bugs and feature requests together in its Bugzilla bug reporter, and of course cannot implement every feature requested at this time.

Do I need to find another web browser now? I've used 11 different browsers in the past ten years, and I've been almost exclusively running Firefox under three different names since it was phoenix (4 if you count the deer creek beta). I was expecting a release late 2008/early 2009 and a stable product. Guess nobody cares anymore. At least it forced my college professors to be more lenient in their grading and not failing a program for having a bug.

Mozilla has a double your money back guarantee, I think. Does Microsoft?

Or if this article had any useful information in it, it would say that the bosses want a re-ordering of the bug list. A bug list which has requests on it! Oh and hang on a sec, its a beta!