Comment 82 for bug 684982

(In reply to Hans-Peter Jansen from comment #77)
> Dear Mike,
>
> with all due respect, but imagine, you suffer from such an issue for a good part of this century, and now, you admit, fixing this issue was a spare time dedication. Just to be clear, it doesn't lower your achievement, but it sheds a really bad light on the *missing* Firefox development control. This is accompanied with *degrading* this issue to an **enhancement**, with what most of us comprehend as a **major bug**.

There are a couple of misunderstandings here and one of those I can't blame you for: I started on this during my spare time and finished the patches during office time. I'll explain how in detail in the next paragraph, so on the next misunderstanding: this bug being set to *enhancement* does not come with a connotation regarding its severity and how much it may impact people in their daily usage of the browser; it merely indicates that fixing the bug will _enhance_ the browser experience and will make a share of our users happier using it, which is evident at this point. And I couldn't be happier about that! A *defect* has the shallow definition of being a software issue that lessens the experience of existing browser functionality. Since virtual desktops have never been supported by Firefox before, it falls out of this category.

My journey started at being the module owner of the Session Restore component. Since I took over that component, I've gradually built up a good sense of the bigger missing features, but I never get the chance to actually implement one or two since my regular work - being an Engineering manager of the Search & Navigation team - doesn't allow for much left-over time to allocate to this specifically. For instance, I'm way behind regular triage, which depresses me quite a bit.
One of those missing features was support for restoring windows to their respective virtual desktops on OSX and Linux. Windows started supporting this since Windows 10, which I intend to cover in bug 890125. My journey started over at bug 440895, for the simple reason that I work on a Macbook daily and so it's my fastest development environment, especially during off-hours when I spend time on pet projects.
One day I stumbled upon an open source project that provided the inspiration I needed to get it working on OSX and was super excited that it did! :mstange helped me out with pointers where I needed them and so I was able to finish it. This one _was_ in fact completed almost entirely during spare moments.
Then I felt the urge to see how hard it would be to do the same for Linux and after that Windows, in order of potential complexity, so with the approval of my manager I implemented the feature on Linux and handled a couple of follow-up bugs after that to make it work across distros. This was during office hours.
Now I'm moving forward with Windows, but I have to do that one using a mix of spare time and office time, because other responsibilities are keeping me plenty occupied.
So at this point I'd like to ask you, if you were to extrapolate my workflow to be that of my 18-ish colleague Firefox Desktop engineers, if you think that the project as a whole is mis-prioritizing its efforts? In answering my question, please offset the expectations you project on us to the difference in size and capital of our competitors; priorization of work items is a not game to us, it's the one thing we must try to be exceptional at to be effective enough.

> Sure, we all know, which OS gets the most attention. But be assured, that for a couple of us Linux Hardcore users (in other words, those, that suffer **most** from this bug since **ages**) such experiences burrow into one's subconscious, and that harms the project as a whole.

Windows gets the most attention indeed, followed by Mac OSX after a laaaaaaaaarge margin. There's no doubt that if we make things work better for our Windows users, the chance of effect on our acquisition and retention numbers is higher. Imagine that even for Windows development and integration we are relying heavily on volunteer contributions. I personally think that's crazy, but it's our reality and we deal with it best we can.

> Please understand, that those of us, that stick with Firefox still, don't stick with it purely for technical reasons. A lot of us know about the **political dimension** of the last free browser engine. My users and me use Firefox, because we don't want to increase Google's influence even further, *despite* bad performances like this. Again, no pun intended to you personally. You're the **hero** for the moment in this small corner of ontology. Some of us may have a picture of the bigger side of it, some obviously don't! It's a pity, that those doesn't read this.

I really appreciate that you're sticking to Firefox - especially happy for the reason you're stating to do so! In turn, I feel honored to be able to make a day of users like you just a bit better by means of doing things I just happen to be able to. It reminds me of what attracts me to open source software development so much, so thank you.

> I sincerely hope, that the fix will work for both situations, where it failed before with different behavior: session restore from a restart of Firefox and session restore from the window manager, and that it will *keep* working. Wayland is lurking around the corner already...

It should be, since we flush the sessionstore state to disk as often we can after a mutation.

> Hopefully, you don't feel offended. You shouldn't.

No worries, I'm not! In fact, I appreciate your feedback and I hope my answer has shed a bit of light onto the spelunks of Firefox Desktop development. Please feel free to reach out (:mikedeboer on Matrix/ Riot, Twitter, etc) anytime if you'd like to ask me more.

> Unfortunately, I have to wait for the 75.0 release to test this thoroughly on about 30 very different openSUSE systems. A backport failed miserably.

Ah too bad, but I hope that it'll make this one worth that wait? ;-)