Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla's 200,000th bug will soon be reported. Not terribly exciting in itself, but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug reporting tool. The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day. Anyone can enter, so let's see if we can have a Slashdot winner (we can all share in the glory)! To help you, they're up to 178,325 and 51 bugs have been filled today. (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of them were duplicates of bugs already reported, or problems with people's setups and not bugs in Mozilla. Hence why the submitter said, "there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla".

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Brown]

It's extremely difficult to compare this with any closed-source application, as a lot of these 'bugs' were in pre-1.0 versions - which never see the light of day in commercial software. Windows 2000 was however rumoured to have shipped with roughly 65000 unresolved bugs.

- Chris

Re:Bugzilla...

[Sn4xx0r]

At the risk of feeding:

For crashes, Mozilla has the talkback feature. If Mozilla crashes, and it hardly ever does anymore, all you need to do is type the url you visited, and click send. That's it.

For other bugs: people will, and do, report them if they are really annoyed with a bug and want to see it fixed. Even if only one in a thousand take the time to file a bugreport you'd still have a pretty large number.

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[mccalli]

The Register article refers to Mozilla 1.0 and 1.0.1, not the current versions.

Actually, I think one bug mentioned there was supposed to apply to current versions.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:circumventing the /. effect

[Masami Eiri]

You could just copy and paste the link

Re:The most annoying being...

[anshil]

Thats easy I guess I got the same, if you trace mozilla you will notice that it hangs at opening "/dev/dsp" which is blocked by xmms.

You're running xmms using artsd? If not you should ;) Then don't start mozilla normally, start it with "artsdsp /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla", artsdsp will force mozilla to work with artsd, and wolla xmms and mozilla share happily the same sound device via artsd. (and mozilla does not hand anymore)

Severity

[yerricde]

What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale

Each Bugzilla entry carries a "severity" anywhere from "enhancement" (request for additional functionality) to "trivial" (slight misalignment of text in form pushbuttons) to "minor" to "normal" to "major" to "critical" (usually a crash or data loss) to "blocker" (a build fails smoketests).

Re:Only 200,000?

[DrXym]

Erm, it doesn't have 200,000 bugs right now, that is for its entire lifetime, for the last 3 years. If you want to see how many there are now, open http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi (not via Slashdot) and find out. I will save you the trouble and tell you there are 28992 open bugs. Compare that the IE / Windows figures - oops you can't because they are hidden. Who knows what bugs are in your operating system?

That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.

Re:Severity

[DeadSea]

• 26.3% (52,618) of the 200,000 have been marked as duplicates of other bugs.
• 11.6% (23,370) of the 200,000 have been marked as not reproducable (not a bug, it works for me)
• 2.6% (5267) of the 200,000 have not yet been confirmed (likely to be dups on not reproducable
• Only 65159 unique, verifiable bugs have been reported against the browser (as opposed to bugzilla, mail/news, and other components that bugzilla tracks).
• • 2.8% (1851) of those 65159 bugs are/were blockers
  • 8.4% (5528) of those 65159 bugs are/were critical
  • 10.2% (6711) of those 65159 bugs are/were major
  • 64.1% (41803) of those 65159 bugs are/were normal
  • 4.9% (3256) of those 65159 bugs are/were minor
  • 2.2% (1401) of those 65159 bugs are/were trivial
  • 7.1% (4609) of those 65159 bugs are/were enhancment

Re:Severity

[DeadSea]

Actually another 10,224 of those 65,159 were marked as INVALID which I believe is another way of saying "not a bug". So take those stats down a bit more.

Please don't spam the database

[Gerv]

Given some of the above comments, this needs saying. This is a fun contest, and the prize is small. Anyone who tries to spam the database in any way will only mean that we can't have this fun any more. So please don't. And it won't work anyway, because we'll notice and stop you.

If you have an automatic bug creation script, please point it at Landfill [bugzilla.org], the Bugzilla test installation, which needs all the test bugs it can get :-)

Gerv

Don't link to bugzilla!

[Anonymous Coward]

By linking to either Bugzilla or ftp://komodo from Slashdot, you can knock out the developers' server therefore halting work. This has been brought up several times before.

Re:The most annoying being...

[cjpez]

Someone else in this thread recommended using arts. Ugh, don't . . . An AC suggested upgrading to the 6.0beta version of Flash; that'll fix the problem right up for you. In case you hadn't heard, the problem was entirely within the Flash plugin. The method they were using to open /dev/dsp forced it to block until it got exclusive access to your soundcard, which means that you'd have to actually STOP xmms or whatever was using your soundcard. It's a really, really, really simple fix, and the code for it was even posted in the Bugzilla bug (search around for it) and sent in to Macromedia, but obviously nobody at Macromedia got around to fixing the thing. Let's hear it for closed-source applications!

It was a really simple fix, too. All you had to do was add a flag to the open() commmand. Macromedia wasn't exactly ignoring the product, either. Since the bug was reported to them (with solution, remember), they've had two or three minor releases of that line of Flash plugin, and nobody there bothered to fix that one line of code. Highly frustrating. One of the more recent posts on the Bugzilla bug was from someone at Macromedia, though, apologizing for how long it's taken, and the 6.0beta does fix the problem.

Anyway, that's more than you probably ever wanted to know about the thing. The only way Mozilla itself could have fixed this was to make all plugins threaded, so if the thread hangs nobody cares, but that's a lot of work that nobody felt like doing. Oh, and people were originally thinking they could just do a binary-patch to the flash plugin, but evidentally the extra flag to open() increases the bytecount of the command by one, which makes doing so rather impossible . . .

Re:Speaking of bugs...

[Tet]

Chimera 0.6 (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering

I'm still stunned that someone was brainless enough to name this Chimera. Surely even the most basic of Google checks would have found that there's already another web browser called Chimera [chimera.org]. I used to use it many years ago on machines for which Netscape was too bloated.