A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/22-year-old-firefox-tooltip-bug-fixed-in-a-few-lines-offering-hope-to-us-all/

by jdblair • 3 years ago

125 30 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

pstuart• 3 years ago

A bittersweet love letter to open source software.

jdblair3• 3 years ago

right? Linus's law updated: "given enough eyeballs, and unlimited time, all bugs are shallow"

informatimago• 3 years ago

Best proof that we need more people in the world! ;-)

dosssman• 3 years ago

While I understand the sentiment, I think we might not necessarily need more people in the world, but enable more people who already came to life to live up to their potential. Too much human potential is wasted in under developed regions.

MrVandemar• 3 years ago

Too much human potential is wasted in under developed regions.

Too much human potential is wasted in highly developed regions as well, but it's not a question of access to resources, it's a question of living in a dysfunctional society driven by a lot of things that aren't "hey, how do we make the world better?"

m463• 3 years ago

But like all history, this young kid is fixing the ills of his parents.

kbelder• 3 years ago

While adding to the foundation they built.

JCharante• 3 years ago

Was always the case. Adding more monkeys with typewriters will get you Shakespeare sooner which is why I’m excited for the future of entertainment & software.

shreyshnaccount• 3 years ago

Also gets you better firefox (kidding, kudos to the guy who fixed this bug)

penjelly• 3 years ago

conversely it also gets you nukes faster

mvncleaninst• 3 years ago

"I just searched for 'tooltip' in the entire code base, examined stuff for possible candidates, and inserted debugging print statements to follow the execution,"

This guy gets it

jeffrallen• 3 years ago

This guy debuks.

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

inserted debugging print

The best debugger there is, and there ever will be. All hail: the printf!

xnx• 3 years ago

Printf is in the troubleshooting hall of fame alongside turn it off and on again.

the_biot• 3 years ago

Because it was "a minor 'cosmetic' issue not causing crashes," there was a good chance nobody would fix it—"Unless I do it myself," Zhu wrote.

Yup, he gets it.

nickm12• 3 years ago

21 year old bug. June 2002 is not 22 years ago, despite what Bugzilla thinks.

mycall• 3 years ago

That would be ironic if this is also a 22 year old Bugzilla bug.

jdblair3• 3 years ago

oops, this is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37836378

also, here's the original submission of the bugzilla ticket: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827995

I liked the Ars Technica story in addition to the bugzilla ticket b/c of the information about the actual bug fixer themself.

isaacfrond• 3 years ago

Bugzilla ticket:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148624

nly• 3 years ago

Humans are great at talking about problems for extended periods of time, ad nauseam, and less good at just getting starting on the solution.

There are at least 6 or 7 bugs and tiny missing features in the software I own at work that would improve the dev and support experience, but I always feel guilty stopping work on my main tasks to tackle them.

appplication• 3 years ago

This is exactly why I’m anti-agile/scrum. You have to get buy in from your manager, team, and product owner for every bit of your productivity, and taking on work that is not explicitly scoped without consulting the broader group is considered being a bit of a cowboy.

Well, I am a bit of a cowboy. But I’m fortunate enough to have a management chain who trusts me to prioritize and incorporate small fixes and features as part of regular development. Admittedly it’s easier when your customers are internal devs, because you know exactly what they want after fielding their stream of questions, support requests, and “would be cool if”s.

mardef• 3 years ago

Per scrum, only the product owners get to prioritize the backlog, and only dev team should selecting tasks. No manager or team buy in.

And if it's an internal tool, then those devs are your product owners.

The first principle of agile is people over process. A lot of people like to blame agile for processes that their own teams just made up instead of taking accountability.

My teams have quarterly "do whatever you want" sprints where bugs like this are targeted.

The_Colonel• 3 years ago

I kinda dislike this sensationalism regarding XY years old bugs. Every large old projects have such old bugs and it's quite normal that if it's so low impact, it doesn't get prioritized.

jdblair3• 3 years ago

This bug isn't just old, it was a bug that probably every Firefox user has experienced and learned to work around. Just because it was "low impact" didn't mean it wasn't personally experienced.

acheron• 3 years ago

Doesn't really explain it. Usually projects are cliques where your contributions will be ignored unless you know somebody on the inside. The only thing the article says is "In the next few hours, they heard from Emilio Cobos Álvarez, who refined Zhu's approach and helped get the commit into the code base." What's the story there?

bgirard• 3 years ago

Mozilla is very friendly to new contributors and certain engineers really go out of their way to support them.

thdc• 3 years ago

Agreed, they have a pretty nice setup for a "big" company. I've been contributing code to Mozilla for the last few years despite not working there and I got started on https://codetribute.mozilla.org/

The most annoying parts would be familiarizing yourself with mercurial/phabricator and getting commit access for certain projects.

TillE• 3 years ago

I've had great experiences contributing small bug fixes like this to various large-ish projects. In any organization that has a process for reviewing GitHub PRs, there should be minimal friction.

If you want to add a new feature with hundreds of lines of code, sure, that's going to be a more involved process.

onemoresoop• 3 years ago

The irony: the bug was opened since this guy was about 1 year old, probably starting to take his first steps and blab his first words.

samtuke• 3 years ago

This has been bugging me for at least a decade. Hallelujah for the fix!

A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug

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