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> What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (...) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people c

> What irritates me is when high-profile projects like Chrome and Firefox (...) then promote themselves as serious, professional-standard projects that people can rely on. They and their evangelists take great pride in stealing market share from established closed source/commercial alternatives (IE in the browser case). I don't think that "closed source / commercial alternatives" (IE in the browser case) have done any better on the bug side than the open source ones. One of the reason people use OSS is that -despite all the flaws that JWZ points out about the bugfixing process-, bugs have historically been fixed faster and the community support is (again, on the average and historically) more responsive.

benesch 14y ago
And you can always fix the bug yourself. Granted, web browsers are a special case, since you can't patch everyone's Chrome and Firefox and Opera, but for every other type of software it's another strong incentive for OSS.
Silhouette 14y ago
I don't think that "closed source / commercial alternatives" (IE in the browser case) have done any better on the bug side than the open source ones. So the received wisdom would have us believe. The thing is, my bug trackers objectively say different. In the past 12 months, I have seen exactly one serious bug in IE (where I define "serious" to mean that user-visible functionality in at least one web app I've worked on does not work properly, even though the same functionality worked in earlier versions of the same browser and/or works in multiple other browsers). That one may have been IE's fault or it may have been a problem with a Java update, since the bad behaviour was at the interface between JS and Java and both had recently had updates when we started to see the problem. In contrast, I have seen serious bugs in Chrome in every web app I work on, ranging from another Java integration issue through to messing up HTML5 video. Several of those bugs still haven't been fixed several update cycles later. Statistically, across all the projects I'm working on -- which since I'm doing various freelance work and running multiple businesses have little in common except for all being web apps -- it is clear that Chrome is by far the flakiest browser at the moment. Firefox is actually faring slightly better lately, though as a Firefox user rather than a developer they still keep making usability screw-ups. I get that there have been a couple of critical security issues with Java recently, but since Firefox itself patches at least a handful of critical issues every release cycle I think the "Don't use this, run away, it's scary!" treatment is frankly rather childish. And as of version 18, Firefox frequently seems to corrupt the display of text areas like the one I'm typing this in. I don't like to be negative about software since nothing's really perfect in this business, but I do point the finger squarely at the advocates of six-weekly releases on this one. The quality of Chrome has never been that great and it's always suffered from "UI rearranging itself at random" syndrome because of the silent updates. However, the quality of Firefox has nose-dived since the move to a rapid release cycle; I'd estimate we're seeing 4-5x as many minor issues in Firefox across all the projects I work on since that happened, plus a couple of howlers like the plug-in screw-up in the first so-called long term support release.
- Volpe 14y ago
  Could you point me to an example of Chrome "UI rearranging itself at random"? The only time I've had issues with chrome, is when I switched to the dev stream... Stable has always been, well, stable.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    I was speaking figuratively, referring to the way Chrome alters its UI during updates. Those updates happen in the background, so you can literally close your browser one day, and then open it the next to find something has changed. In Chrome's case, the most obvious changes lately always seem to be adding junk like apps or a web store or logging in (logging in... to my browser... yes, really). I have no need of or interest in any of these things, yet they now clutter up the UI where once they did not.
    - LeonidasXIV 14y ago
      > I was speaking figuratively, referring to the way Chrome alters its UI during updates. Those updates happen in the background, so you can literally close your browser one day, and then open it the next to find something has changed. If you can't back up your argument with something substantial, then don't mention it. Automatic updates are an actual feature of Chrome and for a good reason. I wouldn't call updates "rearranging the UI at random". And the rest is also complete useless, because your "bug" essentially is that Chrome changes. Well duh! You might not like logging in to a browser, and I can see the point. But that is not a bug in Chrome.
      - Silhouette 14y ago
        But that is not a bug in Chrome. No, and I didn't say it was. The bugs I was talking about are things like stopping playing a short HTML5 video before reaching the end, or failing to send basic event notifications to JavaScript before handing control off to the Java plug-in because the user interacted with an applet. Both of these are regressions in things that used to work, and they fundamentally break the behaviour of web apps using those features. And of course, there have also been numerous rendering problems with everyday CSS in Chrome: banding in linear-gradients, inability to use fractional letter-spacing, I've lost count of how many attempts to get border-radius working properly, etc. These are what I would class as cosmetic issues rather than "serious" ones that actually break functionality like the ones I mentioned before, but they're still things where Chrome is coming in a fairly poor third place in quality of implementation today. None of these is exactly a big secret or somehow overlooked in the Chrome and/or upstream bug trackers, as a quick Google search for any of the symptoms I've just mentioned will rapidly confirm. In fact, the letter-spacing one was first reported in WebKit Bugzilla more than four years ago and remains unfixed today.

benesch 14y ago

And you can always fix the bug yourself. Granted, web browsers are a special case, since you can't patch everyone's Chrome and Firefox and Opera, but for every other type of software it's another strong incentive for OSS.

Silhouette 14y ago

I don't think that "closed source / commercial alternatives" (IE in the browser case) have done any better on the bug side than the open source ones. So the received wisdom would have us believe. The thing is, my bug trackers objectively say different. In the past 12 months, I have seen exactly one serious bug in IE (where I define "serious" to mean that user-visible functionality in at least one web app I've worked on does not work properly, even though the same functionality worked in earlier versions of the same browser and/or works in multiple other browsers). That one may have been IE's fault or it may have been a problem with a Java update, since the bad behaviour was at the interface between JS and Java and both had recently had updates when we started to see the problem. In contrast, I have seen serious bugs in Chrome in every web app I work on, ranging from another Java integration issue through to messing up HTML5 video. Several of those bugs still haven't been fixed several update cycles later. Statistically, across all the projects I'm working on -- which since I'm doing various freelance work and running multiple businesses have little in common except for all being web apps -- it is clear that Chrome is by far the flakiest browser at the moment. Firefox is actually faring slightly better lately, though as a Firefox user rather than a developer they still keep making usability screw-ups. I get that there have been a couple of critical security issues with Java recently, but since Firefox itself patches at least a handful of critical issues every release cycle I think the "Don't use this, run away, it's scary!" treatment is frankly rather childish. And as of version 18, Firefox frequently seems to corrupt the display of text areas like the one I'm typing this in. I don't like to be negative about software since nothing's really perfect in this business, but I do point the finger squarely at the advocates of six-weekly releases on this one. The quality of Chrome has never been that great and it's always suffered from "UI rearranging itself at random" syndrome because of the silent updates. However, the quality of Firefox has nose-dived since the move to a rapid release cycle; I'd estimate we're seeing 4-5x as many minor issues in Firefox across all the projects I work on since that happened, plus a couple of howlers like the plug-in screw-up in the first so-called long term support release.

Volpe 14y ago
Could you point me to an example of Chrome "UI rearranging itself at random"? The only time I've had issues with chrome, is when I switched to the dev stream... Stable has always been, well, stable.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I was speaking figuratively, referring to the way Chrome alters its UI during updates. Those updates happen in the background, so you can literally close your browser one day, and then open it the next to find something has changed. In Chrome's case, the most obvious changes lately always seem to be adding junk like apps or a web store or logging in (logging in... to my browser... yes, really). I have no need of or interest in any of these things, yet they now clutter up the UI where once they did not.
  - LeonidasXIV 14y ago
    > I was speaking figuratively, referring to the way Chrome alters its UI during updates. Those updates happen in the background, so you can literally close your browser one day, and then open it the next to find something has changed. If you can't back up your argument with something substantial, then don't mention it. Automatic updates are an actual feature of Chrome and for a good reason. I wouldn't call updates "rearranging the UI at random". And the rest is also complete useless, because your "bug" essentially is that Chrome changes. Well duh! You might not like logging in to a browser, and I can see the point. But that is not a bug in Chrome.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      But that is not a bug in Chrome. No, and I didn't say it was. The bugs I was talking about are things like stopping playing a short HTML5 video before reaching the end, or failing to send basic event notifications to JavaScript before handing control off to the Java plug-in because the user interacted with an applet. Both of these are regressions in things that used to work, and they fundamentally break the behaviour of web apps using those features. And of course, there have also been numerous rendering problems with everyday CSS in Chrome: banding in linear-gradients, inability to use fractional letter-spacing, I've lost count of how many attempts to get border-radius working properly, etc. These are what I would class as cosmetic issues rather than "serious" ones that actually break functionality like the ones I mentioned before, but they're still things where Chrome is coming in a fairly poor third place in quality of implementation today. None of these is exactly a big secret or somehow overlooked in the Chrome and/or upstream bug trackers, as a quick Google search for any of the symptoms I've just mentioned will rapidly confirm. In fact, the letter-spacing one was first reported in WebKit Bugzilla more than four years ago and remains unfixed today.