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Mozilla The Internet

Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the does-chimera-ssl-hanging-count-as-a-bug dept.
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.)"
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Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug More

Competiton: Mozilla's 200,000th Bug

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  • Awesome (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Botchka ( 589180 )
    I used Mozilla and reported what I thought was a bug. I was surprised and elated by the response that I got in order to try to fix it. Not that this will be a terribly exciting post for other /.ers but that was my experience. However, I want to like Mozilla....really I do.

  • How does this compare to other apps? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pike65 ( 454932 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:47AM (#4598627) Homepage
    This may be me just being hideously misinformed, but I have no idea what to expect for a project of this size? I mean it does sound like a helluva lot . . .

    Mind you, I suppose it's better they all get reported and fixed than ignored until someone independant BugTraqs your ass.

    • Re:How does this compare to other apps? (Score:2, Informative)

      by 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? (Score:4, Funny)

      by TheMidget ( 512188 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:49AM (#4598634)
      It's more than 2^16, which proves that the mozilla project's bug tracking code is able to deal with numbers that large. Unlike Micro$oft, which never have more than 65535 open bugs, because else the counter overflows...
      • "It's more than 2^16, which proves that the mozilla project's bug tracking code is able to deal with numbers that large. Unlike Micro$oft, which never have more than 65535 open bugs, because else the counter overflows..."

        I guess this proves that they are using excel as a bug tracking database -- it can only suppot 2^16 rows.

    • 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
    • Hmm. Mozilla is a ground-breaking project using cutting-edge technology (or it was cutting-edge when it was started). I think that there will be a lot of software engineering papers on the Mozilla processs in the future. It is a bold project, and I believe it has succeeded because of persistence and eye-ball-count rather than good planning and solid methodology.

      Then again, a lot of developers had a lot of fun and AOL Time Warner footed the bill, so who are we to complain (except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development)?
      • except that IE got a monopoly during the years of development
        I don't think the situation would be any different today if Mozilla 1.0 had been released in say 1999. IE is preinstalled on nearly all desktop computers shipped, and nearly all users will not download another browser if there's a working browser already on the computer. That's why IE has well over 90% of page hits, not because of any flaw in any other browser.
    • If you look closer at the actual bug list, you'll notice that few of those are what would normally be labelled "bugs".
      To begin with, there are lots and lots of duplicates. Second, there's a lot of feature requests, which is something completely different. I'm not sure I find it a good idea to report both bugs and feature/improvement requests in the same forum, but that's the path they've chosen. It's also possible to see some of these reports contradict eachother. Specifically the feature requests - I can't remember a good example, but think "I want ctrl-i to execute function foo" vs "I want ctrl-i to execute function bar".
      And don't forget the few outright lies you find in there.

      I wouldn't want to guess at the actual real bug/noise ration in the reports on Mozilla, but I can guarantee that they're far less than 200k.

  • Moz 1.0? What about Netscape 1.0? (Score:3, Funny)

    by eMilkshake ( 131623 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:47AM (#4598628) Homepage
    I believe Netscape 1.0 would be worth more than Moz 1.0 -- that's what I'd rather have.

    <old timer mode>I remember Netscape .9, and wondering if it would ever reach 1.0. We'd say, what more could 1.0 do -- it's such a revolution!</otm>

    • What about Windows 1.01 [net2000.com.pl] (or here [386.bajo.pl], here [pandora.be] or here [mmhart.com]?

      Did someone ask for Netscape 0.9 beta [capnwacky.com] (including a review - haha!)

      I feel bad for direct linking, but hey, Windows is only 700K and Netscape around 300K. :-)
      • Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)

        They were right, dammit.

      • Wow... NS 0.9 seems to work better than NS 4.x!

        That's pretty damn cool.
      • I betcha you have something faster than the 14,400 kbps modem us Netscape 0.9 users had! 300k is still 3 minutes at 14.4 speeds.

        "Okay, it does take a bit longer, on that 14,400 kbps modem, but the Mosaic Communications people have developed it so the text on the pages loads before the pictures. That way, you have something to read while you wait for a picture to load. Though programmers say that we might have higher speed access to the internet in a few years, maybe even through your local cable company! (Hurry it up, TCI and Horizon Cablevision!)"

  • uhmmm... just wait a second... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:54AM (#4598652) Journal
    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 :)

  • Am I the only person who thinks that counting bugs, all bugs, any bugs, is a bit meaningless? I mean, 1,000 bugs like 'left margin on submit buttons is 1 px too narrow on some displays' worry me less than 1 bug like 'all your credit card details will be posted on 500 weblogs around the world'. What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale, where a 'light breeze' bug could almost be called an endearing quirk, and a 'hurricane' bug is likely to trash your hard disc...

    • Severity (Score:5, Informative)

      by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:44AM (#4598876) Homepage Journal

      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).

  • Bah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:55AM (#4598662)
    Everybody knows that Mozilla hasn't any bu

  • Not many bugs, eh? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Munra ( 580414 ) <slashdot@jonatha ... inus threevowels> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:57AM (#4598673) Homepage
    So what's all this about: Mozilla riddled with security holes [theregister.co.uk].

    Even with the "bugs", I still love Mozilla, mind :)

    • Re:Not many bugs, eh? (Score:4, Informative)

      by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:02AM (#4598698) Homepage
      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:Not many bugs, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      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.

    • Version 1.0 had six security-related bugs that have now been fixed, and a new verison is out (1.0.1). If you compare this to version 1.0 of any proprietary Web-related software, I think you'll see the difference. Six sounds like a big number until you start having to use more than just fingers and toes to keep track of JUST the major security problems!

      Mozilla is also easier to find those bugs in. I feel much more confident that Mozilla's security problems will be found and fixed than I do with any proprietary software.

  • estimation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @07:59AM (#4598686) Journal
    According to the whois database :
    Record created on 24-Jan-1998.

    So, 1747 days have gone since this creation (I assume nobody could file bugs on mozilla.org before this date).

    We now have 178,325 bugs, so the average is 102 bugs per day.

    So, the next 21,675 bugs will be files in approximately 212 days, making the 200kth bug being filed around June 5th...

    Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...

    But why expecting a CD when we have apt-get ? ;-)

    How, yes : because it would not be the 1.0 version but rather a subsequent one.

    • The bug database isn't just defects in the build, but also requested features.

    • Now of course, we could assume that as Mozilla becomes stabler and stabler, the filings should now slow down logarithmically, making the filing so late that we'll have have switched to Phoenix 4.0+gno/kMutt in the meantime...

      Actually rate of bug filings speeds up as Mozilla gets more stable. It seems counterintuitive, but as Mozilla gets better more people use it, and so you get a) more dupes, b) more feature requests and c) preexisting bugs are found faster and more times.

      You might have to adjust your equations slightly :)

    • You're assuming that the number of bugs filed per day is nearly constant, which is not the case. As the browser gains popularity, more and more people are filing bugs. (Which are more and more duplicate or invalid bugs, mind you....)

      As much as I hate to link to MQ, here [mozillaquest.com] is a chart from just over a year ago showing the number of bugs filed. Assuming Mangelo has enough brain cells to do a proper graph, I think you can see the trend....

  • circumventing the /. effect (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Masami Eiri ( 617825 ) <brain.wav@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:00AM (#4598691) Journal
    and I quote "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled." Looks like someone has the right idea.

  • if THAT is considered news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:02AM (#4598699)
    Competiton: Slashdot's 10,000,000th Typo
    Posted by CmdrTaco on 08:00 AM November 5th, 2002
    from the VA's-lowered-budget-can't-afford-spellcheckers dept.
    CmdrTaco writes "Slashdot is about to see its 10,000,000th typo. Tis is the 9,999,999th one. Not terribly exciting in itself, but we're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the slashdot hoard will notice the milestone-breaking spelling mistake. The prize is a poster-size copy of Mrs. Malda's revealing low-cut shot [hemos.net]." The typo will show up anytime now - good lukc everyone!
    • Well, if you want to get technical, you did it with "hoard". Although that is a correct spelling of a word, you probably meant "horde". :)

      siri
      • Well, that's a grammatical error and shows a lack of understanding of the English language. Which can be excused for non-english speakers, but not for native speakers. Spelling mistakes are more often than not typos.

        Grammatical errors just make me think the writer is stupid, and therefore the comment has little merit.

        Note for the stupid:

        They're having a party.
        Their party was crap.
        The party is over there.

        See the difference? No? Well you're (that's short for "you are") stupid then. Here endeth the pointless lesson.
        • But given that they all sound the same, it's still possable to make that mistake, even if you are fully aware of the differences. It's just a mistake in a different part of the brain.
          I've used 'their' instead of 'there' once on /., and got a big lecture about it. I already know the difference. It was just early in the morning and I wasn't thinking straight.
          Does this make me stupid? No, just like making a typo doesn't mean I don't know the layout of a keyboard.
          Also, a lot of times grammer errors are overlooked because people are looking so hard for typos.
      • Actually, he did it with the "competiton". :)

    • Re:if THAT is considered news... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Captain Large Face ( 559804 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:46AM (#4598883) Homepage

      10,000,000th since when? Oh wait, that's gotta be since the beginning of November, right?

  • A dumb idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by an_mo ( 175299 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:06AM (#4598710) Journal
    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.

  • Other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kj0n ( 245572 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:17AM (#4598756)
    A bug has been discovered in Bugzilla, which caused it to count every reported bug 5 times. This brings the total number of reported bugs in BugZilla to 83240.
  • I doubt it'll last long if Slashdot's users care enough to compete - just don't Slashdot the bug reporting page.

  • Bad Journalism (Score:3, Funny)

    by afra242 ( 465406 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:25AM (#4598795)
    (NOTE: Although almost 200,000 bugs have been reported, there are not - and have not been - that many bugs in Mozilla.)"


    Reminds me of some awful news stations around here:


    Although only 300 people died in the earthquake, it could have been worst.

    • He's saying that the number of bugs is not equal to the number of bug reports. This is because lots were duplicates of already reported bugs, or not-reproducible bugs, etc.

      Therefore, while 200,000 bugs have been reported, that many bugs do not actually exist.

      Got it?

  • 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.

  • 200,000 reported... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:36AM (#4598842) Journal
    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.
    • 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.

      A document viewer's primary aim is to view documents - to support web standards may also be an aim, but its not the primary one. Most documents aren't written in W3C HTML, but Mozilla should and must render these documents correctly to function as a practical web browser. If it fails to render non compliant data (i.e., most of thwe web) its a bug in that it prevents Mozilla from being used my most of its target audience.
      • Right, but most of the web also follows somewhat closely to "good code" Some of these sites are just so terrible, well, it's really really hard to say how it SHOULD be rendered. Remember, just because IE is the major browser doesn't mean it renders everything right, and with 5.5, 6.0, 5.0 all being different... not to mention mac it's impossible to tell.
  • ...buggy software?

    Include me out!

    (C'mon, I get it, really I do ;)
  • 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.

  • Feature Requests are counted (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:59AM (#4598972) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • I'm running this competition... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gerv ( 15179 ) <gerv@@@gerv...net> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @09:01AM (#4598976) Homepage
    ...and at about 12.30pm GMT, my inbox was suddenly deluged with entries. Even without looking, I knew why that would be... :-)

    Gerv

  • My guess! (Score:2, Funny)

    by rocjoe71 ( 545053 )
    Umm... 1993! Oh no wait, that's Microsoft, you wanted Mozilla.
  • I mean, the stupid "Happy Bugday" pun hasn't even been mentioned yet ?

  • Please don't spam the database (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gerv ( 15179 ) <gerv@@@gerv...net> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @09:48AM (#4599248) Homepage
    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
  • Chimera 0.6 [mozilla.org] (released yesterday), a stable Cocoa-based Mac OS X browser also based on Gecko rendering and free beer/speech (neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?) but cleaner and faster than the competition IMHO. Give it a try. Its own Bugzilla bug reporting [mozilla.org] makes for a sort of amusing read, if you're idle. Same problem, lots of redundant bugs or "whoops my machine was messed up" or "gee, wouldn't it be great for you to work your tail off for free to deliver this obscure feature."

    Bugs can wear you out, the Web is still pretty raw. Now, I didn't want this mention of Chimera to be redundant, so I searched Slashdot first and got:

    Searching For: chimera
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:42:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g X-Powered-By: Slash 2.003000 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
    OK
    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

    Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

    Apache/1.3.26 Server at slashdot.org Port 80

    • Re:Speaking of bugs... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tet ( 2721 )
      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.

      • The formal name of the browser product is "Navigator" -- even more annoying. Chimera is the name of the GPL project -- I don't know what they had in mind, but can't keep it because Chimera wouldn't give them permission [eternaltedium.com] (I assume trademark). The name game comes up often on their message board, and I'm sure they'd welcome our suggestions (not).

        Verion 1.0 would be a nice time to pick a real name. Many have been proposed. My least favorite, iGuana (get it -- "gecko"?).

        Something novel ... hmmm ... how about "Xplorer"?? Or "It Works Better Than It Sounds"?
    • neologism needed: frebeech? frespeer?

      HA! I had that exact same though a few weeks ago!

      Well....not quite. I was thinking free beech or free speer. Not sure which one I prefer.

      It was then, that I realised I was indeed, a true geek.

  • 200,000? (Score:2, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 )
    Is that when it catches up to the Internet Explorer bug count?
  • but they're running a competition to guess the exact date and time that the bug will be reported to Bugzilla.

    Also if the person with the 200,00th bug can name the song of the day he'll win two tickets to see Styx live at The Meadowlands.
  • Its a continuum between all three. One user's annoyance may be an intentional feature. It also may not be a serious failure, but a future enhancement . Because of this continnuum, a good support and development database puts all three together.

    There are also may be duplication. The person updating the database may overlook a similar
    bug or may not be sure it is the same. The same deep root cause may have a variety of manifestations.

    The bug/enhacements databse is one of the most important software engineering tools. Its a good way to tie users, support, and developers together. It is a metric for progress in software stability.

  • aol v. mozilla cds. (Score:3, Funny)

    by MadLibs ( 603254 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:10PM (#4600877)
    The prize is a Mozilla 1.0 CD that might actually be worth something one day

    greeeeeeaaaat. so that one cd can hang around with my 200,000 AOL cds i have floating around.....

  • If the 200,000th bug was an oversight of an FAQ?

    --Joey
  • I want to know how to access this feature:
    Bookmarks can be downloaded at a certain schedule
    One can set bookmarks to be checked at various schedules and notify when the content has changed. At least, in theory.

    I think this one may be BS due to the in theory part. And the title should be changed to things Mozilla hopes to do that IE can't. Either that or it's another case of me just missing a menu in the config, if anybody knows about this one please fill me in.

    Thanks!

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