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.)"

I love mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

In all the years I have used mozilla I have encountered few bugs. I am suprised there are so many.

Brent Jackson

Bugzilla...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually a pretty good idea. But the problem is that the mass population rarely has the time to submit a report through Bugzilla once their Mozilla crashes. They just close it, and launch Mozilla again.

Re:How does this compare to other apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugs are like cockroaches. For every one you see, there are a hundred you haven't seen. Except for mozilla, which most have been visible due to people reporting them. Bugs that are caught don't get to procreate other bugs. So the population diminishes to a marginal capacity over time.

Re:I love mozilla

[psavo]

most of bugs in bugzilla aren't real 'bugs', as in code flaws, but rather wishes for enhancement / policies.

uhmmm... just wait a second...

[jukal]

but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported

before I finish this shell script to flood the bug report database... reset rate-counter...right, the 200 000th bug will be reported in about 42 minutes and 42 seconds. I mean seriously, their intention is probably good - to get serious bug reports - but you can just assume the side effects with all the geeks involved :)

Re:How about IE?

[xutopia]

Well IE has a great deal of bugs as well.

The count of mozilla bugs here includes the production bugs as well. I'm sure IE went through a load of bugs while developping it. Unfortunatly these numbers are not comparable.

A dumb idea

[an_mo]

This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard of. The incentive is just to encourage fake bug reporting, with costs rather than benefits, to the whole project.

A better choice would have been to pick a random winner from valid bugs filed from today until bug 200K.

OpenSource and the bug count

[DigitalOZ]

If this bug count is actually high for this kind of project (and I'm not sure that it is), I imagine it would have to do with the fact that it is an OpenSource project. In a traditional development method, there would be a great deal of internal testing that might result in less bugs being noticed by users. In a situation like Mozilla, there would be so many users testing the product through the development life cycle that many bugs would be reported that might have already been anticipated or discovered and repaired by the time it was being used by users. It seems that instead of a more traditional cycle of build, test, repair, release, in OpenSource you have a build, release, test, repair, release which probably results in inflated bug counts.

Re:Not many bugs, eh?

[DrXym]

Who said Mozilla was perfect? The difference is you can see what bugs are open, assess their importance and see when they are fixed. If a bug bothers you that much, you can even take the patch and retroactively apply it to a branch, e.g. 1.0.x or wait for the next nightly of course. You don't have to wait months for the next 'service pack' or listen to MS or whoever when they fob you off saying an exploit is 'theoretical'.

Of course, security issues are hidden in Bugzilla until they are made public, but that once they become public knowledge (e.g. through The Register article) they are are unlocked. The locked phase is just a period of grace to allow the problem to be worked on privately without alerting every script kiddie to its existence.

200,000 reported...

[Penguinoflight]

Not 200,000 bugs that are bugs. There are many, many duplicate bugs even though Mozilla asks people to look over the bugs and not duplicate. Also, many of these bugs are actually to get Mozilla to render a page "Correctly" when the page is written totally wrong, I.E. not W3.org valid, like slashdot.org, only worse. My guess is that about 1/3 of the bugs are really bugs, the rest are dups, features, or just dumb stuff.

10^58 possible bugs

[frawaradaR]

Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.

Although only almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are - and will be - massively many more bugs that will never be discovered, less so reported.

Among these bugs are certain combinations of for instance 278 nested divs with a loose font tag amidst all.

Re:A dumb idea

[Queuetue]

Read again - the bug submitter doesn't win. It's pool to guess when the bug will be submitted.

Feature Requests are counted

[Midnight Thunder]

Amongst these 200000 bugs are feature requests, duplicates, bugs that aren't really bugs and platform specific issues. What percentage this is of the whole I am not sure, but it would certainly go to reducing the total number.

What would be of interest is how this tallies to any other product where the general public could submit straight to the bug database, rather than going through front-line, second-line and then third-line support.

Duplicates

[MCZapf]

Bugzilla needs an easier way to search for duplicate bugs.

I reported a Mozilla bug once. I tried to search for duplicates, but have you seen that god-awful search form that Bugzilla has? I must have done the search wrong, because it turns out there were several duplicates.

Big waste of everyone's time, because someone had to analyze my bug report before they noticed it was a dupe.