Mozilla IDs 10 bugs, 3 'critical' in Firefox 3.0 RC1

by Gregg Keizer

May 23, 2008 —

Mozilla has identified 10 high-priority bugs in Firefox
3.0, three of them pegged "critical," but won't decide until next
week whether to release the browser anyway or restart the final stretch by issuing
a second release candidate (RC2).

"We are making a go/no go decision early next week, as we are still collecting
feedback [on Release Candidate 1]," Mike
Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said in an e-mail Thursday.

Firefox
3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) launched a week ago, but Mozilla has not yet
committed to RC2. Previously, the company has only said it is targeting June
as the release window for the final code.

On the "mozilla.dev.planning" newsgroup, Schroepfer
also said that on May 27 Mozilla will either call Firefox 3.0 finished with
RC1, or build RC2 with fixes for the 10 bugs that have been collected.

In the meantime, testing will begin on the 10 bugs. "If we need to do
an RC2, they'll be ready to go," he said. "If we ship RC1, we can
get them in the 3.0.1."

The bug
list includes three marked "critical" on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug-tracking
database and management system. Eight of the bugs affect Firefox on Windows,
Mac
OS X and Linux, while two afflict only Linux.

One of Linux bugs has caught the eye of some Firefox users, in part, because
of a short blog post that garnered attention on Digg.com.
The blogger, Jason Clinton, who works for Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc.,
a Kansas City company that specializes in cluster-based systems and Linux servers,
took
Mozilla to task.

On Tuesday, Clinton called Mozilla's support for Linux "second-class"
and blasted the open-source developer over a bug. "Release managers just
made the call that Firefox 3.0 will release with a known bug which brings Linux
systems to their knees."

The bug
Clinton referenced, tagged as "421482" in Bugzilla, is one of
the 10 on the list that Mozilla's using to decide whether to release Firefox
3.0 as is or craft RC2 for another go towards final code.

In Bugzilla, developers argued over the extent of the problem -- which some
Linux users said seriously affected Firefox's performance, as well as their
systems overall -- and where the fault lay -- in the browser or in SQLite, the
database Firefox uses for its revamped bookmark and history feature, dubbed
"Places."

On Wednesday, in a separate e-mail, Schroepfer said that Mozilla developers
were looking into the bug and were confident a solution had been found. "You
can see that a couple different issues have been accidently confused,"
he said. "Overall, I think we have some good options to make this work
well."

Firefox 3.0 will be the first major upgrade to the browser since October 2006.
But Mozilla may ship another version before the end of the year, Schroepfer
has said, in order to add
features that weren't ready in time for Firefox 3.0.

Firefox
3 RC1 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 41 languages
from Mozilla's site.

Computerworld