I heard that this was going to be a GSOC project this summer, but I'm not sure if that was approved or not.

Mozilla methodology: staffs should avoid well defined works so that volunteers, interns, and students can do them.

It’s not a bad strategy: just figuring out what to do can be much harder than getting it done (which can be more easily delegated). Architects (of old) made the big bucks in the days; now according to the google model they’ve all become senior engineers and the definition of and piecing off of work is much less formal (not to mention that it might go out to interns or the community rather the junior devs).

I can also picture it organically happening: if I were a core dev, would I focus on the issues "anyone" could pick up, or the ones that only someone as deeply invested into the code base as me would have any hope of untangling?

Firefox is not their primary product and they have no competition. /S

Oh... I consider Mozilla methodology a good methodology. Staffs probably can do both well and ill defined works better than volunteers, but they do have comparative advantage in ill defined works. A problem with methodology is that well defined works can be delayed, but Mozilla do have massive contributor pool so that it is not usually a problem.

It was, here's the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508

This is the big one that sends me back to Chrome every time I start to get settled in Firefox.