Table showing fixed bugs relevant to Thunderbird by year:
| Year |
Thunderbird | MailNews Core | Protocols & S/MIME | Subtotal |
| 2008 | 603 | 539 | 37 | 1179 |
| 2007 | 426 | 237 | 31 | 694 |
| 2006 | 434 | 182 | 36 | 652 |
| 2005 | 505 | 196 | 56 | 757 |
| 2004 | 556 | 271 | 100 | 927 |
| 2003 | 142 | 333 | 167 | 642 |
| 2002 | 0 | 689 | 206 | 895 |
| 2001 | 0 | 824 | 195 | 1019 |
| 2000 | 0 | 1166 | 107 | 1273 |
| 1999 | 0 | 825 | 2 | 827 |
| 1998 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 8865 |
So as we head into 2009, I thought it would be good for us to look back at Thunderbird development since it got spun off the suite, and also back at MailNews development in the suite itself since it got open sourced back in the days of Netscape (and AOL?) about 10 years ago.
The table comprises of results of queries that show the numbers of currently-fixed bugs that got resolved fixed in each calendar year. (Note that there might be duplicates since a bug can get reopened and fixed in another calendar year.)
The results show that Thunderbird has had the highest number of fixed bugs in 2008 than any other year in its history. MailNews is also having a comeback, with the highest numbers of bugs fixed since 2002, and protocols (POP, IMAP, News & SMTP) and S/MIME having the highest number in 3 years. The total for the year 2008 (1179) is the highest since 2000, highest since Thunderbird was created and second-highest in the entire history of MailNews in the past 10 years or so since the open sourcing.
What can one conclude? Thunderbird is most likely having more developer attention than previous years (even when not taking its infant years into account), especially if you compare with the years of 2006 and 2007, because year 2008 has shown an approximate 70% increase in the numbers of fixed bugs over both years.
Note that the numbers of bugs fixed are not necessarily indicative of the level of difficulty involved in fixing the bugs, one can have more numbers of fixed trivial bugs vs another who has less numbers of fixed critical/blocker bugs which might be more complicated in patching than the former. Also, there were numbers of bugs that had their patches checked in in previous years but which were only marked fixed in 2008, as part of bugday cleanups throughout 2008.
