[Aldo_MX]

Fine print: CCing a bug doesn't mean it will be addressed in a timely manner, it may take 10 years[1] but in the meantime you'll receive 2,147,483,647 mails of other people "me too"-ing and discussing about the bug.

[1] Not exaggerating: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390936

[kibwen]

Having a ten year-old bug isn't a mark of shame, if anything it's laudable when a project doesn't take the easy way out by silently closing ancient bugs like most projects do. Bugs should be fixed according to importance and priority, not simply according to age.

[Aldo_MX]

The problem is that "importance and priority" are pretty much subjective terms, for example, for many people Hello or Pocket were everything but a priority.

[kibwen]

The solution is that it's an open source project. If you disagree with the priorities of the other developers, then you are empowered to take the initiative.

[alphapapa]

Okay, I would like to remove Hello and Pocket from Firefox. Do you think Mozilla will merge my pull request that I am empowered to initiate?

[kibwen]

As though I said anything about merging into upstream, or about Hello/Pocket, or about "open source" meaning "dictating development with random patches". :P But sure, if there were a ten year-old bug about removing them, then I would certainly expect them to welcome such a patch.

[alphapapa]

I guess we're not understanding each other. My point is that Mozilla's development of Firefox is no longer user-driven. Instead it's about what Mozilla thinks users should want, and they can take it or leave it, and if it helps Mozilla make money, users should want it.

Despite vocal and repeated requests and complaints, Mozilla refuses to back down and remove things that users did not ask for and do not want; instead Mozilla does things like sneak Pocket support in in a point-release without any advance warning or any chance for the community to give feedback. And note that Pocket has had a fully functional Firefox extension ever since it was Read-It-Later--there was absolutely no technical reason to build in support for Pocket and deprecate the extension.

Mozilla has never been forthcoming about the real reason for doing this. In fact, the few Mozillians who have spoken about it seem to have had no idea why it happened, either.

Instead all we get is vague "people want to save things, this makes it easier for people to save things" statements. Well, people want to use Facebook, too: where is the built-in Facebook plugin? Where's the built-in Netflix extension? Amazon shopping support? etc. Clearly the decision to build in new Pocket code had nothing to do with a principled policy of making things easier for users.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Mozilla cut a deal and is getting money for it. And if that is the case, what is to stop them from doing the same for anything else? What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support? etc.

[pcwalton]

How many 10 year old software projects on the scale of Firefox don't have 10 year old open bugs?

I suspect that set is precisely equal to the set of projects that just close bugs en masse after a certain date.

[callahad]

You can adjust what events trigger an email at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

[Aldo_MX]

Leaving the cynicism and hyperbole aside, what bothers me are not the e-mails, but the double-sided stance of Firefox as a project, in feature-parity bugs we get the draconian speech of "oh no, we must follow the standards strictly, it doesn't matter if every other browser work fine and it doesn't matter if you already spent your time to develop a patch", but in the outside world we get the announcement of support for webkit-prefixed properties (to name an example).

As a developer, this destroys the credibility of Firefox when it comes to interoperability, and in the outside world I have been perceiving a rise of Chrome-only web applications, this can't be a coincidence.

[ianbicking]

There's a lot of people at Mozilla, and they talk fairly freely, so the result is an inconsistent message. Not everything you see is a stance, much of it is people trying to figure things out and communicate the decisions-of-the-moment.

As far as web compatibility and standards, the inconsistency is part of Mozilla. Is Firefox a tool for open web standards advocacy? Some in Mozilla feel that way. Do we just want Firefox to render things well? There's a whole team for that too (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility). And of course there's Bugzilla, which can feel like a lottery – it's very hard to know who you encounter when you enter the project through there.

This stuff is hard, and making the right choices is hard – I'm sure Mozilla has not always made the right decisions, but I personally prefer ongoing struggles to make the right decision over a consistent and credible stance.

[pcwalton]

Firefox's policies are no different from those of Chrome in this regard.

There is in fact a middle ground between "free for all, implement whatever you want" and "implement only what is precisely required by a standards document". In fact, this middle ground is the only way to make a practical browser engine. The two extremes are untenable.

[6a68]

The bug I linked was just assigned last month: it's being worked right now.

There are definitely some 10 year old bugs, just like there are funny, off-topic, celebratory bugs (https://bugzil.la/1000000). Like callahad said, you can tweak your email settings, and the bugzilla email headers are super easy to filter on.