Mozilla’s Bugzilla now has a left-click menu whenever you see a user displayed. You can email the user (which was the previous left-click action, or see what they’ve been up to in Bugzilla recently on the Activity screen. Administrators can also jump straight to editing that user’s account.

Unlike many sites, it is possible in Bugzilla to change your login name/username/email address. I can be done in the Preferences, on the Email Preferences tab, with the box marked “New Email Address”.

This is much preferred to creating a new account and then trying to migrate all of your CCs and watchlists, or realising you did the wrong thing and asking an admin to ‘merge’ the accounts. If you have created a new account for your new address but not really used it yet, and want to “undo” your mistake, change the address for the new account to something throwaway, and then change the address for the old account to your new real email address. If you have used both accounts significantly, you’ll have to ask the admins to do a merge. Not all Bugzilla admins may be able to do this, as it’s not a supported feature of the software with a UI.

• Keywords
• Freeform, in the status whiteboard
• Its own tagging implementation

You may not have heard of the last of these because it’s disabled by default. Head over to your Preferences, the General Preferences tab, and turn “Enable tags for bugs” to On. This adds new UI to your footer: “add the tag [        ] to bugs [        ]“. You can type a tag name and some bug numbers here, and those bugs will be tagged. Once you have one or more tags defined, you’ll also get the option of adding existing tags to a list of bug numbers.

The tagging system is built on top of saved searches, so:

• by default only you can see the tag and get the list of bugs tagged
• links appear in the footer for each tag (but can be removed)
• you can share the “search” with a Bugzilla group

• Interleaving the bug’s change history with the comments on the same page
• Showing the last time that a bug or attachment flag was changed
• Proving user name autocompletion support
• “Assign To Me” button

The history interleaving (for which there have been several jetpacks etc.) is particularly valuable. If you use bugzilla.mozilla.org, go get it :-)

"Commenter" "is equal to" "<person>"

will find bugs to which that person has added a comment.

"A Comment" "changed before" / "changed after" "<date>"

finds bugs where a comment was added before or after a certain date. You can combine the two (must be in the same boolean chart in order to apply to the same comment) to look for bugs where a particular person added a comment before or after a certain date.

Example: all bugs you have commented on since June 18th 2010 (also uses pronoun substitution)

Sadly, free WordPress doesn’t seem to allow the <video> tag, so you’ll have to go to all the effort of clicking this link (Theora video).

My favourite part is right at the beginning, where Beltzner says breezily “OK! So, now I’m going to change your life!”, and in the background you can just hear Madhava’s entirely unimpressed “I see.”

[Historical correction: as Jesse has pointed out, although he was a great supporter and inspirer, Andreas Franke made Quicksearch, not him.]

In Firefox, head over to bugzilla.mozilla.org, right click on the Search box and hit “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. Give it the keyword “bug”.

Now, you can search Bugzilla directly from your URL bar using QuickSearch syntax, by typing “bug <terms>”.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540&mark=63,100

You can combine that with a fragment identifier to jump straight to one of the comments you’ve highlighted:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540&mark=63,100#c63