For some years now I’ve had the feeling that Firefox’ development has been going in the wrong direction. The software just never seemed to get back to the speedy experience we had with Firefox 2.

Another project I have had this feeling with is Eclipse.

It turns out that both these projects share a commonality: long, standing, unresolved issues to core functionality.

Have a look at this Firefox issue:

Bug 195361 – Can’t select text from disabled form fields

The issue is as the title suggests: You can’t select text from disabled form fields. I have personally had to write workarounds for this (involving styling a normal text field as read-only and disabling it through Javascript) multiple times already.

This issue was reported to Mozilla on February 27th, 2003. That’s well over 12 years ago! Also interesting to note are the Status and the Assigned To fields. The status is set to NEW (for a 12 years old bug? really?) and it is assigned to Nobody…. No wonder this is not getting fixed.

No the issue isn’t *that* serious, but it’s an annoyance. And it’s a core feature. How about you guys drop some of the work on the many bells and whistles we’ve seen appear in Firefox in the last 12 years and fix some of these long-standing issues in the browser core? Not doing so means you are accumulating technical debt and if that isn’t re-payed, it will eventually hurt the user experience and future development as bugs pile up.

If you want them to prioritize this bug, you can let them know by signing up to Bugzilla and voting for the bug.

Do you agree Mozilla should focus on fixing bugs in the browser core for a while or not? Leave a comment below.