Veerle's blog

Next time you come across a bug in a web browser and are thinking “is this still not fixed?” then you might read further to see the reason behind the slow pace that bugs are being squished… You will hear Dave Hyatt talk about the reality of bugs. Dave is the creator of Chimera and many parts of Mozilla. He was an employee at Netscape/AOL until Apple offered him a job.

It's an enlightening view to get things in perspective...

I think sometimes people simply don't grasp the magnitude of the Web. There are (conservatively) 10 million Web sites on the Web. Let's say (conservatively) that each Web site has 50 unique Web pages. That's 500 million Web pages that the Web browser has to work perfectly on. Let's imagine that the browser has done a fantastic job of emulating all the quirks of WinIE and Netscape 4, and that it is really good at laying out malformed HTML. An awesome browser would be (conservatively) 95% compliant, which means that it would have some sort of bug or problem on 5% of those 500 million Web pages. 5% of 500 million Web pages is 25 million malfunctioning Web pages. Let's now assume that only 10% of those Web pages are even seen by someone using Safari itself. Now we're down to 2.5 million pages seen by Safari users. If only 10% of those users even bother to report a bug, that's 250,000 unique bugs that have to be screened.

This is the reality of the Web. People are constantly shocked and amazed that their pet bug hasn't been fixed in subsequent releases (e.g., in Mozilla or Safari), but those people simply don't understand how many hundreds of thousands of bugs their particular problem is competing with.