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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Eight years and 800,000 bugs:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000

Given its age and heritage and historical influence (and given that it's used by hundreds of millions of people), Mozilla's codebase is right up there with Linux and GNU as one of the most impressive examples of open-source software.

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I can't tell if this is sarcastic. But before I read this post I was going to say how much I love Firefox but regret how they fail to address bugs before implementing new features. 800,000 bugs is nothing to be proud of.

800,000 reported bugs, not unfixed. Plus there are a lot of duplicates, invalid and similar.

Mozilla bugzilla has reached bug id 800000. Mozilla typically file a bug for every actionable item, not just defects; the number of non-bogus, non-duplicate, non-feature-request, non-tracking-bug, and non-firefox-bugs (website, thunderbird, all other products since inception) will be much, much fewer.

Yes, this. There have been 800,000 bugs filed for all groups within Mozilla. We use bugzilla for managing projects and tasks (ex: a request for the Firefox 8th birthday cake graphic in the blog post). It's not just for tracking Firefox bugs. We use it for just about everything.

Not sarcastic. The only bug-free software is software that has no users.[1] A well-fed bug tracker is one of those Good Problems To Have.

[1] With the exception of http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

It is not true that the number of bugs users have found and reported correlates linearly with "how buggy" a piece of software is.

And it isn't true that every piece of software is born with the number of bugs, and the number of solved bugs in the tracker is a measure of how close to perfection the software is.

But the second is much closer to the truth than the first.

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