Comments on: Bugs now a pandemic in Firefox 3.5

By: Steve

2009-08-16T14:08:55Z

So Firefox 3.5 has tons of bugs, why are you all surprised? Having worked in the software industry for 12 years and being a consumer of electronics for decades it’s pretty obvious that there’s a bug pandemic when it comes to software.

Here’s how it works. Some group decides to create a piece of software to perform a certain task. They design it and then display it in carefully controlled tech demos. It is then released to the public and then that group moves on to other things. Once released the group couldn’t care less how miserable the experience was. If you manage to find a way to contact them, you’ll experience one of these three outcomes:
1) You won’t get a response
2) The bug will be blamed on other software on the system
3) The bug will be blamed on user error.

Seriously, is it any wonder that piracy is so massive in the software market? Who really wants to risk buying some $200 or more piece of software only to find it doesn’t work and get no support whatsoever from tech support? Hell, many of these companies even charge you for the honor of having their tech support examine the mess their software created.

By: Mike Drabik

2009-07-08T02:48:16Z

I am not so much annoyed with the ‘bugs’ in FF 3.5. What gets me is that ‘Private Browsing’ mode has an issue: if FF is configured in ‘Options’ to always open in ‘Private Browsing’ mode one gets NO indication FF is in that mode - ya know - like Google Chrome does when one has it set-up to open in ‘Incognito’ mode using a command in the Windows short-cut.

I mean WTF - how in the heck am I supposed to know if somebody has diddled with FF’s Options settings and re-configured FF to remember everything without going into the Options every time I use FF? In Chrome I’d know that it’s in Incognito every time I use it - immediately.

I posted this issue at FF’s forum - only got a response that I have select “Private Browsing” mode each time I open FF to see it flagged for it. Again - WTF - why should I have to that when it’s obvious the Mozilla groupies could have supplied private browsing mode with a flag no matter whether manually selected or configured that way in the Options?

Guess I’ll be staying with Google Chrome until the FF groupies decide this is an issue worth addressing or some FF fan creates an add-on to show the same.

By: Benoît Gauthier

2009-07-04T06:14:08Z

I experienced serious issues with tab and history management in FF 3.5 (so much so that I reinstalled 3.0.11 over it — which worked fine). In FF 3.5, new windows opened in new windows instead of tabs (unless I Ctrl-clicked on the links), the history was simply inactive (the Back button remained permanently greyed out) and changes to Preferences were ignored. Searches on the Web for similar problems were unsuccessful. I don’t know what to think now.

By: Asa Dotzler

2009-07-04T03:55:16Z

I think you fundamentally mis-understand how software gets made. That’s not your fault, really. Most people don’t know what really happens in building and releasing software. We (mostly) all eat sausage, but few of us have any idea what a sausage factory looks like.

What is a bit weak sauce is that you’re writing an article that implicitly suggests you do understand these things when you clearly don’t.

All complex software contains flaws/bugs. Browsers, some of the most complex software on the planet, all contain flaws — not just a few, but thousands or tens of thousands of flaws. Safari, Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, they all contain more bugs than you can count. And that’s OK. Because most of those flaws don’t have a major impact on users or developers.

Of course, some do. And those are the sub-set of flaws that should and most of the time are fixed before a major release. But if all of them were fixed, you would never see browser vendors shipping bug fix updates and that’s just not the world we live in.

Firefox 3.0, at the time of 3.5 shipping, was up to version 3.0.11 — that’s 11 updates shipped to correct various flaws in the Firefox 3.0 browser. 11 updates in approximately 1 year, and that’s totally normal.

Complex software has flaws that are either not readily discoverable or whose impact isn’t necessarily obvious until tens or hundreds of millions of users are engaging with the software.

(and it’s not just Firefox that ships regular updates, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all ship regular bug fix updates for their currently released software.)

Yes, Firefox shipped with bugs. It shipped not with a few dozen bugs, but with thousands of bugs, just like every other browser out there. We tried to fix all of the flaws that would have widespread impact on users and Web developers, and we probably missed a few. That’s no different than any other browser.

The fact that you can peer into Mozilla’s suausage factory and cannot do the same for the other browser vendors makes it really easy to write negative Firefox stories but if you could see the process inside of Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. you’d see much the same. No software is perfect when it ships (or ever, actually.) We do our best to address the most important issues before we ship a new release and that doesn’t stop when the new version is out the door. That’s why we offer stability and security updates about once every 5 weeks — to fix those issues that are recently discovered or prove to have larger negative impact than we’d thought. All competent browser vendors do the same.