Remember, there are plenty of FOSS fish in the sea
I’ve been running into a fun bug with Firefox on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Opening a new tab while another one is actively loading content causes the browser to crash.
As a good open source citizen, I was going to go report the bug, but then I saw the Firefox bug submission page. To summarize:
- Use the latest nightly build of Firefox and create a new default profile
- Determine which Firefox component is causing the bug
- Verify that the bug has not already been reported
- Read the bug writing guidelines
While I’m willing to do some extra steps, like capturing a backtrace, I’m not about to go jump through a bunch of hoops to report a bug that will probably sit there untouched in Bugzilla. So I didn’t bother to report the bug.
When opening bugs the onus should not be on the end user. If you want me to report bugs in your software, you need to make it take only a few clicks. I don’t mind installing debug packages as long as the heavy lifting is done for me (and I refuse to install software that cannot be managed by apt or whatever package management system is used).
There are a number of solutions that people have come up for the easy submission of bugs. Apple and Windows have built-in crash reporters. Netscape had Talkback (which is now unsupported). GNOME has Bug Buddy, and Google has released Airbag (now Breakpad).
Sadly each of these have potential drawbacks. Bug Buddy reports the stack trace, which isn’t useful if debug symbols aren’t available (you can’t tell where the various threads were when the program terminated). Breakpad and the Windows crash reporter send memory dumps, which causes me to worry about what private information is going along with it.
I’m sure others will eventually come up with a good solution to this problem, but the important thing for developers to remember right now is this: your end users have only decided to use your software; they have not agreed to be developers or your guinea pigs. Do not treat them as such, even if the bugs they submit are vague, unreproducible, or not helpful. If you upset your users, they won’t remain so for long! If it’s open source they don’t have a financial incentive to see through like commercial software licensees do.
Update: I think I should issue an apology to the Firefox team. As pointed out in a comment, the page I referenced are suggestions for bug writing. And much of my frustration lies not with Firefox, but with the usability of Bugzilla itself (and not just the Mozilla instance of it). And to be perfectly clear, it was not the Firefox project treating users like guinea pigs. Thanks to Gavin Sharp for taking the time to comment.
Tags: bug reporting, firefox, open source
January 20th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Sorry you got put off by the bug submission guidelines - they’re meant to be suggestions on how to write “the ideal bug report”, not strict rules about which bugs will be accepted.
The Mozilla project gets a very large number of bug reports daily, and there just aren’t enough people to sort through them all, so encouraging users to do a bit of work on their own before filing a bug report is an attempt to improve the situation - avoiding duplicate bug reports, giving clear steps to reproduce, and providing as much information as possible are all actions that will significantly improve the odds that real bugs get seen by the right people, and fixed.
That being said, many people submit bug reports that are not “ideal”, and that’s OK. There are many volunteer bug triagers that attempt to weed out the real bugs, work with reporters to get extra information, and try to get the right eyes on the report.
I’ve seen very little “treating users like guinea pigs” in my experience as a bug triager and developer in the Mozilla project, so it sounds to me like the problem you’ve outlined in this blog post should be addressed by clarifying the bug writing guidelines and improving the bug submission process in general. I would be happy to hear more by email if you think I’m missing something.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:38 am
Haha,
Well I can sympathize. I’ve had multiple encounters with bug buddy. My Terminals will crash (usually when I’m in a completely different window) and about 95% of the time I’ll fill out the bug report and bug buddy will come back with “Error 999: Not accepting reports”.
So even automated systems are only good if they’re used.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I’d like to also add that we have several feedback mechanisms available, not just Bugzilla.
First, for crashes, use the Firefox built-in crash reporter. It will provide a useful stack trace to Mozilla developers that can be aggregated with the tens of thousands of other crash reports so we can categorize, prioritize, and fix crash issues as quickly as possible.
Second, there’s Bugzilla — the dev version, and a more user-friendly Bugzilla “Helper” that assists new bug reporters in filing the most useful possible bug reports.
Third, there’s Mozilla’s Hendrix — a simple feedback form that categorizes and submits your feedback to the Mozilla QA community.
There are also other simple tools like the Report A Broken Website Wizard (available on the Help menu) that make submitting non-working sites a breeze. We’ve also got newsgroups and forums where you can take issues.
- A
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:55 am
Indeed, we’ve always been big believers in collecting automated crash reports at Mozilla. We actually ship Talkback in Firefox 2, even though it’s not open source, because the data is so incredibly valuable in fixing bugs in our code, and in that of plugins and extensions. Unfortunately, Talkback doesn’t support OS X on Intel processors, so I suspect that you’re left out in the cold there.
In Firefox 3, though, we will use Breakpad and collector software we wrote called Socorro, which works great on OS X on Intel, as well as giving us an open source solution, handling threads, and so forth. I understand that GNOME is using Socorro as well, which is great to see. The betas of Firefox 3 have the new breakpad-based crash reporting in them, and are generally a much improved experience on Mac.
Nonetheless, those instructions should probably be updated to be a bit more friendly to the breadth of user that now comes to Mozilla to report problems, and should explain why those things are so valuable to us.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
@Shaver: You are correct about my hardware; I’ve got a MacBook Pro for work. I also run Ubuntu everywhere else and don’t recall it ever bringing up Talkback after a crash. Will have to check and see if Ubuntu disables/doesn’t ship it and open a bug perhaps. Of course by the time they fix it Firefox 3 will probably be out.