Friday, July 04, 2008

Mor on Browsers!

Firefox 3, I dub thee Sir Crashalot. Internet Explorer, thou shalt be known forever and a day as: The Great Freeza.

Actually, Firefox 3 is more like Wile E. Coyote. It bounces back in an eyeblink, resumes where it left off, as if nothing had happened. Until the next disaster. Internet Explorer takes more time to restart, and you have to do it all over again, passwords and everything.

You know what? The software industry is in perpetual beta state. It’s the only industry of its kind known to humankind. Imagine if automobiles came with the same kind of bugs and incompatibility issues? Like, if your satellite-guided navigation system caused the fuel injection system to malfunction…

… uh oh…

6 comments:

Gen Kanai said...

Jun, have you added any add-ons or extensions to Firefox 3? If you have, one of them might be causing the crashes.

Jun Okumura said...

Flash Player, Gen. But it crashes mainly (though not exclusively) while I'm going to (or from?) my gmail account, not when I'm knowingly using the Flash Player. IE freezes when I use the search box on my Google toolbar, often enough to be very irritating.

Jan Moren said...

Strange. I do run Firefox 3 since the beta releases and it has been decently stable. I have especially never had any problem at all with any Google site (guess what browser many of the Google enginners are using themselves). I would have agreed with Gen that it was an old extension making things difficult, or perhaps some leftover settings from an earlier version.

From a larger view I, as sort-of pert of the software development community, do take some responsibility for the rather unsteady state of software today. But we - you - users are also to blame. Stable, secure, vertified engineering takes a lot of time, and a lot of resources. Do you want to wait another two years for a slower, less functional Firefox? No, neither do I.

And the buying public has never wanted to either; in the software world, "good enough" has always won over "great", if "good enough" is accompanied by "avaliable now" and "cheap or free". Microsoft did not unseat the solid enterprise software king IBM and become the largest software company in the world by taking their time writing stable fully functional software. They've aimed straight at "good enough", and usually won, doing so. Who decides who wins? You. I. All of us, collectively.

We have the software we deserve.

Jun Okumura said...

Yes, of course, but that only begs the question: Why?

Jan Moren said...

"Yes, of course, but that only begs the question: Why?"

Not for me to answer. Ask yourself: why did you download Firefox 3 instead of waiting for the 3.1 version?

Jun Okumura said...

Because I assume that it's better than Firefox 2. But that's not an answer to the question.