After identifying and analyzing various performance issues I noted related to hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 nightlies, it was now time to make my findings public. Bugzilla would be the end result, but there were quite a few steps in between. First, there was consultation. I’d never filed a bug before and as punctual as I try to be, I had the great luck of a one-time schedule conflict occurring when we were covering bug filing in class. I already knew a bit from earlier classes and my own playing around with Bugzilla, but like most of my colleagues I consulted with Dave on IRC before submitting. That’s when things got interesting.
IRC is yet another new thing to me in DPS909. I’ve used chat clients like MSN, but within 5 minutes of conversing with Dave he had pulled in a Senior Software Developer from Mozilla to #seneca where we were talking. After a short bit, when we figured that the performance issue was related to Direct2D, he pulled in a “Platform Graphics Guy” at Mozilla. Bam, bam bam. Within 10 minutes of consulting with Dave on IRC I’d spoken with and been helped by two extremely knowledgeable guys located in various places around North America. The connectivity enabled by IRC still boggles me.
With all of their help, I now had some guidance as to how to go about filing this performance bug. I knew it needed to be filed in the first place. I knew it was in some way related to Direct2D. And I knew to CC Dave on it and add the “[chromeexperiments]” tag to it. With all this new information to process, I consider myself lucky to have remembered 75% of it (thanks for adding the [chromeexperiments] tag, Dave!). After filing the bug, the Open Source wheels churned to life.
Just as Linus’ Law applies to bug identification and resolution, it seems to also apply to bug spotting in a different light. Between the 4 viewers on Bugzilla and another two on IRC, those six sets of eyes were able to spot a duplicate bug, this one from four months prior. A dialog is now going and some of the best programmers in the world are now looking at resolving this with collated effort. Release early, release often indeed.
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