7 ms·

This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in Firefox. Typical

This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in Firefox. Typically they'd be ignored, fixed several months later if I'm lucky[1], and still ignored as they get closed by an automated bot[2]. Chrome specifically created an "icebox" to automatically close old bugs. I'm convinced that the Chrome team at least has an internal bug-tracker they use and the external one (crbug.com) serves the same purpose as fake thermostats on the walls of office buildings. (To Chrome's credit, they took the only security bug I filed very seriously and fixed it in a couple days.) [1] Unlucky: Still an issue with broken translating gradients in non-hardware-accelerated canvas: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774387 [2] This bug was ignored, fixed, and for a year I asked for it to be closed. It was finally closed by a street-sweeping bot: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62373 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62373

js2 14y ago
Chromium has more bugs than devs to fix them all. There have been heated debates on chromium-dev about what to do about old bugs. Some devs think they should stay open till they are fixed, but given Chromium's development pace that doesn't necessarily make sense. So they close them, assuming if the bug is still relevant it will be reopened. One way they prioritize bugs (I believe) is by the number of times the bug has been starred. I do not believe they have separate bug databases. They do have the ability to mark bugs private, which afaik is only used for security issues.
- KaeseEs 14y ago
  This is a slightly worse version of the behavior that prompted JWZ's first rant about bugtrackers in open source software (cf. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ).
- js2 14y ago
  Here's the most recent discussion on chromium-dev I can find about it - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.devel/34134 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.devel/34134
sixothree 14y ago
I've actually experienced the same problem with some government funded open source projects. Months go by without so much as a peep about the problem.
evmar 14y ago
I worked on Chrome for most of its life. The internal bug tracker was closed when the product went public (we manually migrated some bugs we were actively working on, and the rest got comments of the form "if you really want this fixed, we're sorry to say that you need to refile it on the public tracker"). The real truth is sadder: many bugs are lost, much like yours. In the old days I (and a few friends) personally reviewed every bug marked "Linux" and we attempted to triage them, but at one point I realized bugs were filed faster than we could classify or fix them. That isn't saying new bugs were being introduced rapidly, but rather that there's a lot of random spam ("my site doesn't work" / "does it work in other browsers?" / "no") and not-yet-implemented feature requests that appear to users as bugs. The latest bug on the public tracker is bug number 174163. Chrome was released in late 2008, so let's round up and say the tracker's been up for five years. That's averaging nearly 35k bugs a year, or 95 a day, and in reality the rate was slower in the early years so it's much faster than that now. Even just reading each bug and understanding whether it's reporting an actual issue takes hours. I have come to believe that a publicly writable bug tracker is a bad idea. Something like what SQLite does (where once users must first establish via some other mechanism they know how to file useful bugs -- yours look good at a glance, but I'd recommend attaching the demo html to the tracker so the link doesn't eventually 404) likely makes a lot of people mad but at least they're not shouting into a vacuum. Recently (like in the last few months) I heard they've allocated more resources to looking at the tracker, so maybe things will improve. It's honestly just a hard problem.
- brownbat 14y ago
  > It's honestly just a hard problem. We really need a way to reset those bug report counters to zero in one fell swoop. The solution, of course, is planned obsolescence. Bonus: http://xkcd.com/844/ http://xkcd.com/844/
- abstractbill 14y ago
  This makes me think there's a market for a better bug tracker - maybe one where people submitting bugs have karma, and you can sort bugs by that.
  - 14y ago
bsimpson 14y ago
I've had quite good luck getting responses to my bug reports, but it requires active lobbying. You need to figure out whether it's a Chrome bug or a WebKit bug. If it's a WebKit bug, file a link in WK's Bugzilla and link to it in a crbug issue. Then, go on IRC and pester the person responsible for fixing that component. It's helpful if you can go through the source and propose where the bug might be. Examples: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32303 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32303 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35472 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35472 I hate to pester people who are already working on other things, but some bugs just need to be fixed at the browser level.
- lizzard 14y ago
  This is a good approach! Doing a little work to narrow down the scope of the bug and where it belongs can go a long way towards bringing it to the right developer's attention. It also helps to attach a reduced test case and as much information as you can glean about the bug so that it can be reproduced. And as you say, there is a point as well to go on IRC and ask. :D
  - bsimpson 14y ago
    Yes, reductions definitely help.
Silhouette 14y ago
This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in Firefox. I think the thing that frustrates me the most isn't the bugs themselves. After all, in general for OSS I'm not paying anyone to make or fix things, and they owe me nothing. What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (coincidentally both browsers, but that's not my point) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people can rely on. They and their evangelists take great pride in stealing market share from established closed source/commercial alternatives (IE in the browser case). Then normal people start using them, expecting a better experience. But then every time there's an update, we play the "will my software even still work?" lottery. (And this applies not just to the browsers, in that example, but also to all the web apps running on them, for which users might be paying real money.) Unfortunately, on the kinds of geek-friendly forums where these movements tend to start before they expand to the general population, it's often sacrilege to criticise a favoured OSS project. You may get hostile replies, or simply voted into obscurity by whatever mechanism is in place, even if like jwz you take the time to cite specific problems or have provided detailed bug reports and test cases. (Doing the latter is absurdly difficult for many of the large projects anyway, but it gives them a convenient excuse to ignore problems.) Again, it's completely up to these projects whether to promote helpful contributions or to be hostile. They're giving their stuff away, and owe the rest of us nothing. But it would be nice if there was a little truth in advertising. If an OSS project isn't going to take bug fixing or regression testing seriously, it shouldn't promote itself as professional standard software. (And if a project is created/maintained entirely by one amazingly generous person running the whole show but who has limited time to devote to the project and can't keep up with everything, it would be helpful if there was a prominent warning to that effect somewhere people considering that project would find it before they started relying on it unwisely. Perhaps that would even prompt more concrete support and/or contributions to help the project out.)
- HerrMonnezza 14y ago
  > What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (...) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people can rely on. They and their evangelists take great pride in stealing market share from established closed source/commercial alternatives (IE in the browser case). I don't think that "closed source / commercial alternatives" (IE in the browser case) have done any better on the bug side than the open source ones. One of the reason people use OSS is that -despite all the flaws that JWZ points out about the bugfixing process-, bugs have historically been fixed faster and the community support is (again, on the average and historically) more responsive.
cdcarter 14y ago
> serves the same purpose as fake thermostats on the walls of office buildings. It's worth noting that many of those thermostats aren't "false", but just have their control disabled. That means they still provide current temperature information to determine if heating needs to be activated.

js2 14y ago

Chromium has more bugs than devs to fix them all. There have been heated debates on chromium-dev about what to do about old bugs. Some devs think they should stay open till they are fixed, but given Chromium's development pace that doesn't necessarily make sense. So they close them, assuming if the bug is still relevant it will be reopened. One way they prioritize bugs (I believe) is by the number of times the bug has been starred. I do not believe they have separate bug databases. They do have the ability to mark bugs private, which afaik is only used for security issues.

KaeseEs 14y ago
This is a slightly worse version of the behavior that prompted JWZ's first rant about bugtrackers in open source software (cf. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html ).
js2 14y ago
Here's the most recent discussion on chromium-dev I can find about it - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.devel/34134 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.chromium.devel/34134

sixothree 14y ago

I've actually experienced the same problem with some government funded open source projects. Months go by without so much as a peep about the problem.

evmar 14y ago

I worked on Chrome for most of its life. The internal bug tracker was closed when the product went public (we manually migrated some bugs we were actively working on, and the rest got comments of the form "if you really want this fixed, we're sorry to say that you need to refile it on the public tracker"). The real truth is sadder: many bugs are lost, much like yours. In the old days I (and a few friends) personally reviewed every bug marked "Linux" and we attempted to triage them, but at one point I realized bugs were filed faster than we could classify or fix them. That isn't saying new bugs were being introduced rapidly, but rather that there's a lot of random spam ("my site doesn't work" / "does it work in other browsers?" / "no") and not-yet-implemented feature requests that appear to users as bugs. The latest bug on the public tracker is bug number 174163. Chrome was released in late 2008, so let's round up and say the tracker's been up for five years. That's averaging nearly 35k bugs a year, or 95 a day, and in reality the rate was slower in the early years so it's much faster than that now. Even just reading each bug and understanding whether it's reporting an actual issue takes hours. I have come to believe that a publicly writable bug tracker is a bad idea. Something like what SQLite does (where once users must first establish via some other mechanism they know how to file useful bugs -- yours look good at a glance, but I'd recommend attaching the demo html to the tracker so the link doesn't eventually 404) likely makes a lot of people mad but at least they're not shouting into a vacuum. Recently (like in the last few months) I heard they've allocated more resources to looking at the tracker, so maybe things will improve. It's honestly just a hard problem.

brownbat 14y ago
> It's honestly just a hard problem. We really need a way to reset those bug report counters to zero in one fell swoop. The solution, of course, is planned obsolescence. Bonus: http://xkcd.com/844/ http://xkcd.com/844/
abstractbill 14y ago
This makes me think there's a market for a better bug tracker - maybe one where people submitting bugs have karma, and you can sort bugs by that.
- 14y ago

bsimpson 14y ago

I've had quite good luck getting responses to my bug reports, but it requires active lobbying. You need to figure out whether it's a Chrome bug or a WebKit bug. If it's a WebKit bug, file a link in WK's Bugzilla and link to it in a crbug issue. Then, go on IRC and pester the person responsible for fixing that component. It's helpful if you can go through the source and propose where the bug might be. Examples: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32303 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32303 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35472 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35472 I hate to pester people who are already working on other things, but some bugs just need to be fixed at the browser level.

lizzard 14y ago
This is a good approach! Doing a little work to narrow down the scope of the bug and where it belongs can go a long way towards bringing it to the right developer's attention. It also helps to attach a reduced test case and as much information as you can glean about the bug so that it can be reproduced. And as you say, there is a point as well to go on IRC and ask. :D
- bsimpson 14y ago
  Yes, reductions definitely help.

Silhouette 14y ago

This frustrates me too. I've run into a laundry list of Browser (mostly canvas) bugs over the years, 95% in Chrome (my main browser) and 5% in Firefox. I think the thing that frustrates me the most isn't the bugs themselves. After all, in general for OSS I'm not paying anyone to make or fix things, and they owe me nothing. What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (coincidentally both browsers, but that's not my point) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people can rely on. They and their evangelists take great pride in stealing market share from established closed source/commercial alternatives (IE in the browser case). Then normal people start using them, expecting a better experience. But then every time there's an update, we play the "will my software even still work?" lottery. (And this applies not just to the browsers, in that example, but also to all the web apps running on them, for which users might be paying real money.) Unfortunately, on the kinds of geek-friendly forums where these movements tend to start before they expand to the general population, it's often sacrilege to criticise a favoured OSS project. You may get hostile replies, or simply voted into obscurity by whatever mechanism is in place, even if like jwz you take the time to cite specific problems or have provided detailed bug reports and test cases. (Doing the latter is absurdly difficult for many of the large projects anyway, but it gives them a convenient excuse to ignore problems.) Again, it's completely up to these projects whether to promote helpful contributions or to be hostile. They're giving their stuff away, and owe the rest of us nothing. But it would be nice if there was a little truth in advertising. If an OSS project isn't going to take bug fixing or regression testing seriously, it shouldn't promote itself as professional standard software. (And if a project is created/maintained entirely by one amazingly generous person running the whole show but who has limited time to devote to the project and can't keep up with everything, it would be helpful if there was a prominent warning to that effect somewhere people considering that project would find it before they started relying on it unwisely. Perhaps that would even prompt more concrete support and/or contributions to help the project out.)

HerrMonnezza 14y ago
> What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (...) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people can rely on. They and their evangelists take great pride in stealing market share from established closed source/commercial alternatives (IE in the browser case). I don't think that "closed source / commercial alternatives" (IE in the browser case) have done any better on the bug side than the open source ones. One of the reason people use OSS is that -despite all the flaws that JWZ points out about the bugfixing process-, bugs have historically been fixed faster and the community support is (again, on the average and historically) more responsive.

cdcarter 14y ago

> serves the same purpose as fake thermostats on the walls of office buildings. It's worth noting that many of those thermostats aren't "false", but just have their control disabled. That means they still provide current temperature information to determine if heating needs to be activated.