Some Mozillians recently stood up an instance of Review Board - a web-based code review tool for evaluation purposes. Having used Review Board at a previous company, I can say with high confidence that when properly configured, it beats the pants off Splinter (the code review interface baked into Bugzilla). Here are some advantages:

• The HTML interface is more pleasant on the eyes (subjective).
• Interdiffs actually work.
• Intra-line diffs are rendered.
• You can open issues for individual review comments and these issues can be tracked during subsequent reviews (Bugzilla doesn't really have anything similar and review comments tend to get lost unless the reviewer is sharp).
• It integrates with the VCS, so you can expand code context from the review interface.
• There are buttons to toggle whitespace differences.
• Syntax hightlighting! It even recognizes things like TODO in comments.

You can read more from the official user guide.

If you have any interest in evaluating Review Board, the easiest way to upload patches to Mozilla's instance is to run mach rbt.

mach rbt will launch the Review Board tools command-line client (called RBTools). From there, you can do a number of things. Run mach rbt help to see the full list.

Here are some examples:

# See a diff that would be uploaded to Review Board:
$ mach rbt diff

# Create a review request based on the current Mercurial changeset:
$ mach rbt post

# That should print out a URL to the not-yet-published review
# request. If you go to that URL, you'll notice that the fields
# in that request are all empty.

# Next time, you can have some fields auto-populate by running:
$ mach rbt post --guess-summary --guess-description

# This grabs info from the commit message.

# To update an existing review request (e.g. to submit a new patch):
$ mach rbt post -r <review id>

# (where <review ID> is the ID of the review).

# You can also have it generate a "squashed" patch from multiple
# commits:
$ mach rbt post 164123::164125

Run mach rbt help post for more options. Also see the RBTools documentation for more.

It's worth noting that mach rbt will download an unreleased version of RBTools. This is because the released version doesn't work well with Mercurial. I contributed a handful of patches to RBTools to make Mercurial work better.

Before you dive in and start using Review Board for actual code review, there are some things you need to know:

• Mozilla's Review Board instance does not yet send emails on changes. Bug 958236 tracks this. When it works, you'll see nice emails, just like you do for Bugzilla reviews.
• Review Board doesn't currently interact with Bugzilla that well. In theory, we could have Review Board update corresponding Bugzilla bugs when actions are performed. Someone just needs to write this code and get it deployed.
• If you create a Bugzilla attachment that contains the URL of a Review Board review (e.g. https://reviewboard.allizom.org/r/23/), Bugzilla will automatically set the MIME type as a Review Board review and set up an HTML redirect when the attachment is downloaded via the browser. You can even set r? on this attachment to have Bugzilla nag about reviews. See bug 875562 for an example.
• There is currently no way to upload a patch to Review Board and update Bugzilla is one go. I have proof-of-concept code for this. Although, there is pushback on getting that checked in.
• Review Board 2 is in development. It has a number of new and exciting features. And it looks better.

Finally and most importantly, Review Board at Mozilla is still in evaluation mode. It's usage has not been officially blessed as far as I know. I don't believe the SLA is as high as other services (like Bugzilla). Nobody is really using it yet. It still needs a lot of polish and integration for it to realize its potential. And, there is some talk about the future of code review at Mozilla that may or may not involve Review Board. In short, the future of Review Board at Mozilla is uncertain. I wouldn't rely on it to archive review comments from super important reviews/decisions.

Despite the shortcomings, I encourage people to play around with Review Board. If nothing else, at least gaze upon it's patch rendering beauty and witness what the future could hold.