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> It's just the usual tug of war between developers and users for control of the computer. And the annoying part of this being developers who act as if they do

> It's just the usual tug of war between developers and users for control of the computer. And the annoying part of this being developers who act as if they do not understand (or just brush off) the concerns that the users have. Like, people want control over their own machines. How is that hard to understand?

viraptor 8y ago
Because functionality like that can be used to enable/disable features outside of tests as well. For example gating new things which could become a stability issue. Sometimes it's a choice between control or no control. Sometimes it's between your browser crashing or not. The power users will care about control, but the general population of users not really.
- admax88q 8y ago
  > For example gating new things which could become a stability issue. And yet we were somehow able to ship stable software to millions of people in the days before telemetry/studies. What telemetry/studies truly provides is offloading QA costs to users.
  - viraptor 8y ago
    The software was also simpler. And we were not really great to shipping stable software in the past.
    - admax88q 8y ago
      Sure we were. I have video games that were pressed to CDs with no possibility of updates and they still run to this day. On a complete play through of many of them you wouldn't notice a single bug. Using users for QA has made us lazy and borderline incompetent.
      - viraptor 8y ago
        I think you're thinking of extreme cases here like games which are released with bugs these days for holiday rush, because the patching is easy / built-in. That's not the case for everything and not the case for Firefox. And the stable software in the past may be due to nostalgia. They had bugs. Even before dialup was common, games were patched: Diablo 1 had a number of patches for example, Quake 3 went up to 1.32, Dune 2 (1992) got 1.07. We just accepted bugs, because... what can you do?
        admax88q 8y ago
        And yet none of those updates that I can think of had such ridiculous regressions like you see in todays "ship daily" software.

viraptor 8y ago

Because functionality like that can be used to enable/disable features outside of tests as well. For example gating new things which could become a stability issue. Sometimes it's a choice between control or no control. Sometimes it's between your browser crashing or not. The power users will care about control, but the general population of users not really.

admax88q 8y ago
> For example gating new things which could become a stability issue. And yet we were somehow able to ship stable software to millions of people in the days before telemetry/studies. What telemetry/studies truly provides is offloading QA costs to users.
- viraptor 8y ago
  The software was also simpler. And we were not really great to shipping stable software in the past.
  - admax88q 8y ago
    Sure we were. I have video games that were pressed to CDs with no possibility of updates and they still run to this day. On a complete play through of many of them you wouldn't notice a single bug. Using users for QA has made us lazy and borderline incompetent.
    - viraptor 8y ago
      I think you're thinking of extreme cases here like games which are released with bugs these days for holiday rush, because the patching is easy / built-in. That's not the case for everything and not the case for Firefox. And the stable software in the past may be due to nostalgia. They had bugs. Even before dialup was common, games were patched: Diablo 1 had a number of patches for example, Quake 3 went up to 1.32, Dune 2 (1992) got 1.07. We just accepted bugs, because... what can you do?
      - admax88q 8y ago
        And yet none of those updates that I can think of had such ridiculous regressions like you see in todays "ship daily" software.