> If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually

> If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually just uninstall. Some software has more of a relationship with users than others. Doing support for B2B SaaS, I knew many of the users by name, and they knew me. Even then, though, some people would just live with terrible bugs for a long time. We once had an issue where the initial page post login would take 30+ seconds to load because it synchronously calculated a bunch of their stats. I don't recall anyone writing in to complain, and when I fixed it, I don't think they said anything. (The slowdown was a boiled frog situation, since it got slower as they grew.) Because it was a website, we could see the load time, and I saw it and fixed it, but if it were desktop software, the only way we'd have known would have been to load up a test account with hundreds of thousands of fake users and orders and fake shipments, and gone through the process of using the fake data in a real way. Load testing is obviously good, but it will never beat being able to see how it performs for real users, and just hoping those real users will report back to you is completely unrealistic. Don't get me wrong: I handled thousands of bug reports and feature requests during my time in support, and we got a lot of useful feedback. But insight into the actual performance is critical. Major bugs will go unreported for a long time. People just expect software to be buggy these days.