Bugzilla

What Does Bugzilla Mean?

Bugzilla is a web-based bug tracking program developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The program is used to keep track of Mozilla’s projects, including the Firefox web browser. The software allows users to submit tickets that the developers can act on. As with Mozilla’s other projects, Bugzilla has an open-source license.

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Techopedia Explains Bugzilla

Bugzilla is an open-source web-based bug tracking program that, as the name suggests, was created by the Mozilla Foundation. The program was first developed by Netscape in 1998 when it relicensed its Netscape Navigator under an open-source license as the original Mozilla suite. The software allows users to submit tickets and for project members to assign bugs a severity level and to assign bugs to specific developers.

Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Wiseman in Tcl before being reimplemented in Perl. The bug tracking system is web-based and runs on a database management system and Perl 5. It is primarily developed to track bugs for Mozilla’s various projects, including the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client. It is an example of “dogfooding,” or a company actually using the products they are developing. Besides Mozilla, Bugzilla is also used for several other major open-source projects, including FreeBSD, WebKit, the Linux Kernel and GNOME, among others.

Bugzilla is also self-hosting. The bugs in Bugzilla itself are also tracked in Bugzilla.

Bugzilla is famous for its unusual message when no bugs are found in its search engine, “zarro boogs found.” It is intended to be a humorous statement that no software is completely free of bugs by intentionally misspelling the message that no bugs have been found.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…