How, as a programmer, to report bugs I find in core Gecko browser-engine behavior in Firefox

Question

When I’m programming a Web app and I run into a problem that only seems to happen in one browser, I know that a somewhat-essential step among my overall programming tasks as a “good citizen” is to stop coding for a bit and take time to report the bug in the right place—so it can get fixed and other Web developers (including me) hopefully won’t run into the same problem later.

In such cases with Firefox, I understand enough to know when the cause of the programming problem I’m seeing is in the core “Gecko” browser-engine code in Firefox (rather than instead being, say, a bug in the Firefox user-interface code—the code for the so-called browser “chrome”).

Given that, is there a URL that will take me directly the form where I can quickly get to the right bugzilla “product” and “component” to report a Gecko browser-engine bug against?

Having already reported a few bugs in the Gecko code, I am somewhat annoyed at being forced to use the form at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi, which seems to assume I’m reporting a bug for the first time and I want guided step-by-step help. But this ain’t my first barbecue…

Answer 1

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&format=default is the URL you want.

That’s because in the case of Firefox, the right bugzilla “product” to use for browser-engine (Gecko) bugs is actually Core (not the Firefox component—and there is no Gecko component).

That URL above takes you directly to an actual bug-reporting page—that is, as you’d want, it completely skips all the designed-for-first-time-bug-reporters step-by-step guided-help stuff.

You do need to then manually choose the right “component” from the Component list there, but if you already know the right component, you can make a bookmark that includes it; e.g., https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=DOM%3A%20Workers&format=default is a URL that will let you report problems with Firefox Web-Workers behavior.

Adding the &format=__default__ parameter/value is the important part needed to get bugzilla to skip all the designed-for-first-time-bug-reporters step-by-step guided-help stuff.