3 ms·
> The bug reports I liked least were the ones that complained about some pervasive, completely disabling flaw permeating the entire browser from top to bottom.
by gwillen 6y ago
> The bug reports I liked least were the ones that complained about some pervasive, completely disabling flaw permeating the entire browser from top to bottom. Invariably this was that the browser "was slow," but startup crashes were probably a distant second place. The bug report would inevitably add something along the lines of this should be obvious, or talk about the symptom(s) as if everyone must be experiencing it (them).
> I'm not doubting what people say they're seeing. But you should also consider that asserting the software has such a grave fault effectively alleges I either don't use the software or care about it, or I would have noticed.
It sucks to get these kinds of reports when you are a solo dev who uses your own project, and you really do actively use the software and care about it.
But I feel like I've been trained over the years that the devs very often do _not_ seem to use their own software or care about it. So if a major showstopping problem happens on my machine, and it repros on my other machine, and then again on a randomly-selected friend's machine, I tend to assume it's widespread and the devs just don't care that much. (I still try to clearly state the repro conditions as best I am able. But if I can't find a system it _doesn't_ repro on, then it's hard to be specific.)
Sadly, this is probably a case where lots of otherwise-good users have been let down by shitty devs, and lots of otherwise-good devs have been let down by shitty users, and nobody trusts anybody anymore.
(Most recent irritating example: Google Sheets for Android has a 'remove' menu item in the 'Last opened by me' view, which claims (when I select a document owned by another user) that it will remove the document from view, but "Collaborators will still have access." At least the last two times I checked, this isn't true; it will effectively delete the document, for everyone but the owner. This has been the case for months at least; I believe it may have started when Google Drive switched their model to disallow "hard links" of documents. I'm suspicious about whether anybody on the Google Drive team has a very clear mental picture of what their sharing/containment model even _is_ anymore, at least for free users who don't have a "workspace". I reported this using the 'feedback' tool in the app, but I'm well aware that it will not reach anybody who cares.)