this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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The unfortunate thing is, most people aren’t having these kinds of performance issues. If a bug can’t be reproduced, it can’t be fixed. That makes these kinds of things pretty much impossible to fix until someone who is having the problem has the time/energy to dig into it, and the technical expertise to know what information and data to provide for a good bug report (which, honestly, is very rare), and then make themselves available for all of the inevitable follow-up questions and troubleshooting steps.
OSS devs are volunteers 99.9% of the time and they work on whatever they want to work on. A well written bug report with lots of context, a full memory snapshot, clear reproduction steps, expected/actual behaviour, full information on how to set up the environment from a fresh install, and so on, has a really good chance of being picked up by a developer. But if it’s even a little bit harder to just get to work on it, it’ll probably be ignored, because there are a hundred other more interesting issues to work on.
People can only help as much as they’re able to, we can’t fix your issue unless we know what it is, and usually the best place to start is by trying to make sure the surrounding environment is sane. If we went off assuming there was a Firefox bug and spent hours looking at a memory dump only to discover that your computer is a 2003 Intel Celeron or something, it would be a bit frustrating.
And yeah, most people just do not have the technical expertise to write a good bug report for a web browser - most devs are web developers or do business logic stuff - so it’s a tough nut to crack, and there’s not a huge number of people volunteering to help out open source software teams doing the soft skills stuff to coax useful information out of people who report issues :)
Hope that makes sense! OSS is very much a “be the change you want to see in the world” kind of place!