Jun 13, 2002 | Q
I dunno why, but I figured that the release of Mozilla 1.0 was a sign that all the reported bugs were fixed. According to this version of the CSS level 1 spec that’s annotated with active Mozilla bugs, though, I was wrong. It’s a handy bookmark to have for those of you who need to program around the problems that still exist in the released code.
You can see the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto to see their intentions for this release. API and library freezes and eliminating as many deadly crash bugs as possible were the deciders, not standards compliance, although that is also a goal. They state “Some people believe that most standards-compliance bugs should be fixed for anything that deserves the 1.0 brand. That’s ok, but the number of milestones needed to fix such a long list is hard to guess, but probably quite large at the current fix rate.” In other words, since your vision of “all bugs fixed” is effectively impossible, so was a process for deciding HOW MANY being fixed was ENOUGH. So instead they focused on the other aspects even as bug fixes on the rendering continue to come in. I believe this makes as much sense as the Microsoft Process Model.
• Posted by: Dan Hartung on Jun 15, 2002, 2:08 AM