Prevent data: URLs from being used for XSS

Re:Prevent data: URLs from being used for XSS by ryandrake on Monday April 30, 2018 @05:17PM (#16962440)

Most places I've worked, the older a bug is, the less likely it will ever be fixed. The reasoning goes "users have lived with it for this long, so it must not be important." And we have regressions in the code that's about to go out that have not faced users yet--fix them first.

Has anyone ever successfully argued for going back and fixing ancient bugs, prioritizing it over fixing more recently-discovered bugs? What argument did you use?

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Re:Prevent data: URLs from being used for XSS by jcranmer on Monday April 30, 2018 @05:43PM (#16962701)

Bug age is not a particularly useful metric for determining priority.

In my experience, doing bug triage, old bugs generally fall into a few categories:

* Feature requests that aren't WONTFIX but so low priority that they'll stay on the bottom of the list forever (e.g., https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2892).

* Bugs that are impossible to fix in the current architecture, and are too low priority to justify the architectural changes to fix them (e.g., https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9942).

* Bugs that have too little information to be implemented, and just make everyone who stares at them decide to move onto another bug. These do get cleaned up during periodic deep triages, so I don't have a good 4-digit bug for this.

* Bugs that are political. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540)

* Bugs that exist in components that never get triage because no one works on that stuff (or the project itself may be dead) (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1334).

All citations are rare 4-digit bugs or super-rare 3-digit bugs on Mozilla's bugzilla instance. I myself have triaged a few of those out of existence, but I never fixed any of them.

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Re:Prevent data: URLs from being used for XSS by latortuga on Monday April 30, 2018 @05:21PM (#16962478)

This reminded me of the Coding Horror blog post "New Programming Jargon"[1] - The Common Law Feature:

> A bug in the application that has existed so long that it is now part of the expected functionality, and user support is required to actually fix it.

[1] - https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

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