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> As I said, I'm a professional software developer, and as such I appreciate the value of good bug reports and feedback from users, and I hate it when users mak

> As I said, I'm a professional software developer, and as such I appreciate the value of good bug reports and feedback from users, and I hate it when users make blanket criticisms. But Mozilla and Google are among the most user-hostile organisations on the software landscape in this respect, and until they fundamentally change their approach, I don't see this situation improving. This seems like a strange comment What other large scale software do you use on a day to day basis that you can even find and report bugs instead of just sending them in to some companies /dev/null and hope they eventually get fixed

Silhouette 13y ago
It's not only the difficulty in reporting bugs that is the problem, it's the rapid release cycle and the frequent regressions and bugs it seems to introduce. I don't know which of the other "large scale software" I use would have the same difficulty reporting bugs, because nothing else I use breaks basic functionality every few weeks. However, for smaller-scale things, I've recently been in touch with a couple of on-line services I use and the manufacturer of a hardware device I bought about various problems. I interacted one-to-one or even one-to-many with some of their technical folks, with very satisfactory service in each case. No doubt there is a bug tracker somewhere on the other side and some new records got created in it along the way, but all I had to do was send a simple message describing my problem and then answer their rapidly-provided follow-up questions. I was happy to make the effort to do that, because they made it easy for me to help and gave me a feeling that my effort was doing something useful. I would be just as happy to contribute usefully to supporting browsers if it was just as easy to do it. I want to help, and for a long time I really tried to do so. But I live in the real world, and I literally can't afford to spend half a day when no client is paying me just to do someone else's testing for them every time I find a bug in a major browser. Once in a while I could cope with, in the spirit of helping out. Several times a month just isn't practical.

Silhouette 13y ago

It's not only the difficulty in reporting bugs that is the problem, it's the rapid release cycle and the frequent regressions and bugs it seems to introduce. I don't know which of the other "large scale software" I use would have the same difficulty reporting bugs, because nothing else I use breaks basic functionality every few weeks. However, for smaller-scale things, I've recently been in touch with a couple of on-line services I use and the manufacturer of a hardware device I bought about various problems. I interacted one-to-one or even one-to-many with some of their technical folks, with very satisfactory service in each case. No doubt there is a bug tracker somewhere on the other side and some new records got created in it along the way, but all I had to do was send a simple message describing my problem and then answer their rapidly-provided follow-up questions. I was happy to make the effort to do that, because they made it easy for me to help and gave me a feeling that my effort was doing something useful. I would be just as happy to contribute usefully to supporting browsers if it was just as easy to do it. I want to help, and for a long time I really tried to do so. But I live in the real world, and I literally can't afford to spend half a day when no client is paying me just to do someone else's testing for them every time I find a bug in a major browser. Once in a while I could cope with, in the spirit of helping out. Several times a month just isn't practical.