Month: August 2006

DANGER! Will Robinson! DANGER!

If you are not comfortable using beta software, do not know how to back up your profile or don’t know what bugzilla is, then please do not download nightly builds for testing!

Every little bit helps…

One of the strengths of the Mozilla community which has helped make Firefox such a success are the people who love Firefox who also help to make it better. Many people have filed bugs on issues they have discovered and I would like to ask those people for a little bit of help.

Mozilla developers have been working hard to fix bugs for the releases of Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 later this year. So far, there have been 3331 bugs fixed on the 1.8 branch from which Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 will be released. Unfortunately, only 341 have been verified as fixed so far.

Crashes and Hangs

211 bugs which cause crashes or hangs have been fixed but not verified.

Regressions

327 bugs which cause regressions have been fixed but not verified.

If you filed one of the bugs on these lists, it would be very helpful if you could download a nightly build of Firefox 2 or Thunderbird 2 and verify that the bug you filed is actually fixed. Please comment in the bug and add me (bclary at bclary dot com) to the cc list.

Tip: You can easily find the bugs you filed by clicking on one of the above links and after the query loads, clicking the “Edit Search” link at the bottom of the page. Then under Email and Numbering, click the reporter check box under Any of of: and add your bugzilla email address to the field below the contains select box.

Thanks to Brian J Polidoro for bringing this to my attention.

Better now than never!

If you are a developer for a commercial web site or web application and Firefox compatibility is important to you, your employer and your customers, please begin testing your content and applications with the nightly builds of Firefox 2! The code is very quickly being locked down so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get changes made before the release of Firefox 2. If you don’t report a problem with your site or application soon, it may be impossible to get the fix into the next release. The most important things to look for are regressions where something that worked in Firefox 1.5 is now broken in Firefox 2. This month marks the sixth year I have been a member of the Mozilla Community and it has never failed that someone from a major web site or application developer waits until the last minute to test their content with the upcoming release. Don’t be the grasshopper! Test today not tomorrow!