Mozilla Only Fixing 20% Of Firefox 3.0 Bugs Before Launch

Mozilla revealed this week that it only plans to fix about 20% of the existing bugs in Firefox 3.0 before the final release in 2008, in a strategy that relies on developers prioritizing bugs called "blockers" - so called because they're serious enough to delay release. According to the developer website:

"We have 700 bugs currently marked as blockers...That's too many. We're asking [requiring] component owners to set priorities on blockers, as a first pass of what bugs should be Beta 2 blockers. You want it to be about 10% of blockers, or what you can get done in four weeks."

"We'll be doing pretty much the same thing for Beta 3, which means that something like 80% of the [approximately] 700 bugs currently marked as blockers will not be fixed for Firefox 3... The hope is that by 'fixing the most important blockers' several times, we'll get to a point where we can cut the rest without feeling bad about the quality of the release. And if we do feel bad, we can add an extra beta or two."

Because each bug is being judged by how severely it "prevents users from browsing the Web on a daily basis," the strategy is more effective than it sounds. Last week Firefox interface designer Mike Beltzner asked developers to address memory leaks, compatibility issues and regression errors, and as Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 gets pounded against the rocks of reality it will begin to resemble the second Beta planned for December.

Mozilla Won’t Fix 80% of Firefox 3.0’s Bugs [NYT]