14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla came out to set the record straight following claims that Firefox 3.0 would ship with some 80% of bugs still unresolved. A scenario where the successor of Firefox 2.0 would be released with the vast majority of the problems that plague it still not attended to was denied by both engineer Asa Dotzler and Mike Shaver, Director of Ecosystem Development at Mozilla. "That claim is simply horseshit. 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," Dotzler revealed pointing that the reports were either malicious or ignorant in nature.
Even from the beginning of October, Mozilla disclosed that there were over 700 bugs still blocking Firefox 3.0. As a consequence, the first beta of the open source browser was postponed. Gran Paradiso Beta 1 is just around the corner with Mozilla having made available preview versions. Shaver denied the Firefox 3.0 claims but also reinstated Mozilla's commitment to quality. "It's not our intent to cut Firefox blockers from the fix list against a hard numerical target or fixed deadline", Shaver commented.
Still, Shaver did offer an insight into the way Mozilla tackles bugs in Firefox 3.0, and with this provided confirmation that the next version of Firefox will not be the first piece of software in history to ship bug free. This because of the very general definition of the term bug, which includes not only blockers but also additional features, optimizations and improvements that have to be integrated before the product is finalized. At the same time, Shaver promised that Mozilla will take care of all the blockers, meaning bugs that would end up impacting user experience, by affecting the quality of Firefox 3.0.
"Because of history and some tool limitations, and because we now have a larger set of people triaging blocker nominations than we ever have before, the "blocking" flag doesn't always strictly mean "we would not ship Firefox 3 if this specific bug isn't fixed". It can also mean "we should look at this in more detail before we ship" or "we'd like to focus developers on this set of bugs" or "don't forget to do something (release note, document workaround, reach out to site authors, etc.) here before we ship"," Shaver added.