Reducing The Number Of Unconfirmed Firefox Bugs

Over the last 4 weeks or so, as part of the drive to lower the number of unconfirmed bugs, I’ve read every bug filed against Product:Firefox that was last touched in 2006, whose status was UNCONFIRMED and whose keywords were not hang, crash, regression or mlk, with the intention of closing as many as possible.

My main target were bugs filed against the now no-longer-supported 1.5 branch, bugs involving websites that have long ago been redesigned, bugs involving plugins that now have newer versions, end-user support questions, bugs where the reporter was asked to provide more information but didn’t and bugs that I recognise were caused by an extension. In such bugs I have asked the user if they still see the problem in the latest firefox 2 release, and if they don’t, would they please resolve the bug as WORKSFORME.

I have no idea how many bugs I read in total (~2000+ I’d guess) but the bugs I did comment in were whiteboard tagged with CLOSEME. The four tags I have used were “CLOSEME 06/27″, “CLOSEME 07/05″, “CLOSEME 07/09″ and “CLOSEME 07/14″. Many (200+) such bugs have been closed by the reporter themselves (and the CLOSEME tag removed) which is excellent news. The number of bugs that I’ve tagged that remain open now stands as ~1,225. Over the comming month or two I plan to go through these and close as many as is correct to do so.

It should be noted I am erring on the side of caution here; I would rather leave a bug open and unconfirmed than close it erroneously. But at the same time it should be understood that if a bug is closed as INCOMPLETE, this does not mean it contains no useful information. Rather that the source of the information is no longer forthcoming, and so the bug report is unlikely to progress any further.

Bugs of a technical nature, bugs that include a discussion with names I recognise and bugs that I just plain didn’t understand I have not commented in, and so remain open and unconfirmed. (Currently standing at ~684 bugs filed against Product:Firefox last touched in 2006.)

And to finish, a nice graph of how we’re progressing.