Mozilla Crosses 800,000 Filed Bugs
Mozilla's busy Firefox developer community submitted Bugzilla bug number 800,000 on October 10.
That is almost 800,000 reported bugs in more than 14 years of the history of Bugzilla (I am mentioning "almost" since the bug count does not start with bug number "1", but with bug number "507"). Of course, Firefox does not reach quite that far back as the first pre-release version did not arrive until September 2002 and the first final release until November 2004. Bugzilla's origins date back to 1998 when the bugtracker was released as open source software by Netscape.
Nevertheless, the number of bugs filed by Firefox developers is impressive.
Of the 799,493 listed bugs (until October 10), more than half a million (530,953) were filed between the release of Firefox 1 on November 9, 2004 and October 10, 2012. Prior to the release of the first final browser, the database already included 268,033 bugs. The most recent 100,000 bugs were filed between November 4, 2011 and October 10, 2012. That bug filing rate puts the Mozilla community on a pace of 293 bugs filed per day.
Mozilla tracks _ALL_ modifications in their bugzilla tracking system. So this is not just problems but also enhancements.
This also tracks work as diverse as creating new webpages, submitting and implementing standards and outreach to various websites.
It is simply a way for an organization that is extremely diffuse around the world to keep track of all the work going on. Truely impressive!
I have submitted bug reports about Mozilla/Firefox not working with some web sites due to bad HTML or scripting. Many bugs are duplicates and some bugs only affect a specific user due to conflicting programs on their system (like malware).
Oh, then it is indeed impressive.
1. Take the users' complaints seriously, and fix the bugs ASAP.
2. Deny. Deny. Deny.
I don't like Firefox to be honest. Chief reason (before I spent enough time to figure it out) was its separation of the search and address bar and it's apparent inability to change the address bar's search engine. Now that I've figured that stuff out, I basically don't use it out of habit.