Milestone bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 500,000 was filed on 2009-06-23 at 11:06 ZST by long-time Mozilla contributor ‘timeless’. Which makes it the third time he’s filed a milestone bug. And we can see how he does it. :-)

The winner is Jean-Yves Perrier, who guessed 2009-06-28 11:32:26 – 5 days and 26 minutes out. It looks like the accuracy is decreasing – the 300,000 bug winner was less than 7 hours out, and the 400,000 bug winner was 1 day 15 hours out. It’s getting easier to win! :-)

Jean-Yves writes:

I’m a tester of nightlies. I download them almost every day and use them for day browsing. I reported a couple of bugs, but not much. I also tried (on the french forum www.geckozone.org) to maintain a thread annoucing the main new stuff that land on the trunk, so that non-english speaker can follow the development.

I was a long time user of Netscape (and Mosaic before). End of the 90s/early 2000s, after a brief period with Opera (not yet free as a beer) and with IE, I switched to Mozilla, then Firefox 1.0. One bug that drove me crazy while Firefox 1.5 was still in beta made me look at the development of Firefox and since then I switched to the nightlies (who got the patch :-) and sticked to them since then.

Jean-Yves wins a Firefox backpack. The two runners-up are Wladimir Palant (5d 13h 54m) and Phil Ringnalda (12d 20h 54m). They both win their choice of a t-shirt from the Mozilla store. Wladimir writes:

I am the developer of the Adblock Plus extension. I got involved with Mozilla in 2003 shortly after switching to Mozilla Suite – playing around with add-ons was just natural, it didn’t take long for me to start fixing issues in the ones I used.

Phil writes:

I started triaging and offering occasionally-useful advice on livemark bugs in the summer of 2004, then noticed that there were lots of other bugs I could triage, then realized that if I wanted things fixed right I could just download the source and figure out how to patch things myself, then some time passed, and I somehow wound up a Thunderbird peer.