Interesting to read all of this. Bugs in more obscure areas being open for years is something I am pretty familiar with, although then on the Firefox side of things.
I personally never have been able to muster up the courage or energy to try and dive into the code base there, though. Part of that is simply because such a huge code base is daunting to delve into. But an even bigger stumbling block was always the prospect of having to deal with the entire process of submitting the fix and getting it approved. Certainly with Mozilla the interactions I have had on Bugzilla with various people there as well as in other places simply made me decide to work around the issues.
I am honestly surprised how relatively smooth the process seems to have been for the author, dealing with Chromium developers.
> Certainly with Mozilla the interactions I have had on Bugzilla with various people there as well as in other places simply made me decide to work around the issues.
Sure. I should point out though that I also had many positive individual experiences with people from Mozilla. Interesting conversations and insights in various things. It is just that overall I had a few too many interactions, which would make hesitate trying to invest a lot of time in things like PRs.
What it mostly comes down to is that communication several times seemingly seemed a one way street. Where I provided information (often explicitly asked for) only to be effectively ghosted.
Not in the sense that I was dealing with busy people where it just took time for them to get back to it again. But really getting no response at all. Often when I then did follow up on it (several months later) I would see the bugzilla ticket change a tag or some other meta attribute but nothing more.
To be clear, this isn't even unique to Mozilla/Firefox. I had similar experiences on other open source projects, although it differs really per project. It is more that with something as big as a browser, where setting up the development environment can already take up the better part of a day, it becomes an extra barrier for even trying.
My negative experience with Firefox was with this 6 year old feature request relating to container colors. [0] They have hardcoded some colors & icons (6 or 8 I think?) as possible options. The problem is: If you have more than half a dozen of Gmail accounts that you want to containerize (e.g. for client work), it is really hard to keep them apart at first glance. Compare this to Google Chrome, where you can choose the browser color for each associated Gmail account individually.
I tried to manually extend & build it for myself, but the codebase relating to that was just a mindfuck to work on...
Yeah, pretty much my experience with any large open source project - I find that if its a solo activity or a small focused group my bugs might get any attention, but after there's more than 10 or so contributors I politely move on by.
Too many times submitting a feature request or reproducible bug report in github that's "ranked by thumbs up" and then having that closed as wont fix.
I personally never have been able to muster up the courage or energy to try and dive into the code base there, though. Part of that is simply because such a huge code base is daunting to delve into. But an even bigger stumbling block was always the prospect of having to deal with the entire process of submitting the fix and getting it approved. Certainly with Mozilla the interactions I have had on Bugzilla with various people there as well as in other places simply made me decide to work around the issues.
I am honestly surprised how relatively smooth the process seems to have been for the author, dealing with Chromium developers.