Greetings, Mozilla hackers and bugjockeys This is a courtesy note to let you know that sometime in the next few weeks, you will become extremely disoriented and frustrated for a period of two or three days. (This is in addition to any non-Mozilla-related disorientation and/or frustration you may normally experience over the holiday period.)
The cause of the misery will be that I have designed, and Gerv has implemented <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98707>, a complete redesign of Bugzilla's search page. So when bugzilla.mozilla.org is next updated from Bugzilla CVS (either the tip or the 2.16 release), <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi> will start looking completely different from how it looks now, and it will take some time for all of us to get used to the new design. I have redesigned the search page for two reasons. Firstly, a noticable part of the pathology of the Mozilla Project is that potential contributors try to report a problem, get told to look in Bugzilla, and find it horribly difficult to search for bug reports. (You can see this reported regularly in postings to n.p.m.general and n.p.m.mail-news in particular.) Secondly, even for those intimately acquainted with Bugzilla, the search UI is extremely inefficient. The page is very long, requiring lots of scrolling, the most commonly used fields are at the bottom rather than the top, and the Search button (obscurely labelled `Submit query') is hidden just about as well as it could be without using CSS. Those changes in the new design which will benefit novice users include the following. * The most common fields are at the top of the page, with less common fields further down. * Fields are more clearly labelled, e.g. `A description entry:' is now `A comment contains:'. * `Submit query' is now `Search'. Those changes in the new design which will benefit experienced users include the following. * In many cases, you should now be able to carry out a basic search without scrolling your browser window at all. * Even for a complex search, you will need to scroll much less than you do currently, as the page is more compact and related controls are grouped together. * If you are using a Mozilla build from the past few months, or if you are using a browser other than Mozilla, you will now be able to press Enter anywhere in the form to carry out the search (at the moment, Enter just adds another row to the boolean search form). Here's roughly how it'll look: <http://landfill.tequilarista.org/bbaetz/query.cgi> Here's roughly how it'll look, once Gerv has fixed the residual UI bugs: <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=50517> Since I had so much fun doing that, I'm currently working on redesigning Bugzilla's home page (again), to cure more of what ails the Mozilla Project -- the problems where unresolved and unverified bugs, and unreviewed patches, often get lost and forgotten. -- Matthew `see? he's not *completely* useless' Thomas <http://mozilla.org/>
