First Look At Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 531
DaMan writes "ZDNet takes Firefox 3.0 beta 2 for a spin and draws some conclusions that should be sweet music to Mozilla's ears.
"Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I've tried it on — from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters. No matter what you want doing — opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking — it all happens swiftly and smoothly. What surprises me about the Firefox 3.0 beta is how many memory leaks that Mozilla have fixed. Complaints of memory leaks with Firefox 2.0 were met with an attitude of "Leaks? What leaks?" Considering that there have been more than 300 leaks plugged, it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves.""
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
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It's been claimed for IE8, but anyone can download the Firefox betas and check for themselves. Big difference.
Wouldn't be the first dose of vapourware to come out of Redmond....
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
No, it really did. That's your first clue that it isn't done yet. :)
Firefox is developing more quickly because it doesn't have all of the baggage. It has its hurdles to overcome like and project, but they don't have to worry about making their browser render any page written in Netscape Composer properly. IE still has to make all those FrontPage sites look like the code wasn't shat out of some third graders science project on the effects of mold on diodes.
With good developers, lots of money, and as much savvy as anyone, Microsoft has the ability to produce all kinds of amazing software. Once they've made some great software (like a browser that renders Acid 2 properly), that's when they start adding in all of the backwards compatibility that effectively crushes the product.
I believe that Windows could be every bit as polished as OS X, as lean as Linux, and as secure as BSD if they didn't bend over backwards to maintain compatibility with every in-house-developed Visual Basic app that accesses odbc.ini, has hard coded requirements to be at the root of C:, and writes user preferences to HKLM.
Mirosoft needs to learn that sometimes things shouldn't work with their new OS. That isn't to say that Apple doesn't do this to the other extreme, breaking things with every point release and forcing developers to come out with updates to all of their software every year or two just so that it won't run in some degraded mode, but there's a happy medium in there where you do a lifecycle on the components of your OS. If they could ease people along, explain the benefits of the new way of doing something, and make a clean break instead of using hacked together tangled bundles of cruft, we'd all be in a better place.
Ok, so I strayed off topic. Anyway, I use Opera. : )
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Do you think Firefox doesn't have to render stuff written in Frontpage too? Mozilla pays just as much attention to quirks mode as Microsoft.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Abandoned no.
Kludging to pass the test without actually implementing full CSS2 support, yes.
ACID2 is a test of a few of the hardest elements of CSS2, based on the assumption that if you passed the test, you'd have good support for the rest of the standard. If your goal was to just get the tick in the box for marketing purposes, it wouldn't be hard to just kludge it.
That's very much Microsoft's style. Look at how they're hacking ISO instead of fixing MSOOXML for a recent example.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. We won't be able to fix problems today, so fuck it, let's just never fix them.
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
The version of Acid 2 on the author's website [hixie.ch] works fine.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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And before anyone jumps on this and points out that it used to, it has apparently regressed and no longer does, according to the last comments on the bug.
Not to mention that, even if it does (finally) pass Acid 2, there are still a ton of CSS3 features that Firefox fails to implement.
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to pay less attention to passing any one test and more to standards compliance as a whole.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm... The test breaks and IE is suddenly compliant while previously compliant browsers are not *dons his tin foil hat*
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Those of you watching from home from an IE browser, please don't attempt the Acid2 test, or you might do further damage to the test.
- RG>
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
ACID2 == Microsoft Mentality == Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
1) custom coded their HTML generators (e.g. Frontpage) to generate badly broken webpages, which any sane browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc) would have problems with
2) custom coded IE to handled the badly broken webpages produced by Frontpage, etc.
The net result was a World Wide Web full of pages that are "best viewed with Internet Explorer". Embracing broken "MS Extensions" is wrong. Yet the people behind ACID2 seem to think that it's a good idea that a web browser should take a badly broken webpage and guess at what the "intent" of the webpage is. What's next? A C compiler that tries to guess what you intended your program to do, rather than returning a compiler error when it encounters broken C code? The solution to broken webpages should be to fix the broken webpages.
Re:ACID2 == Microsoft Mentality == Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
NB, I'm rather sceptical of the ACID2 test, for the reasons perfectly expressed in this comment [slashdot.org], but your comment is nonsense.
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Memory Leaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
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There may be some teensy weensy little miniscule memory leaks that could be plugged up here and there, but the reason people think there is some big memory handling problem is because of how we cache things for quick use of the 'back' button. Your browser isn't taking up hundred of megabytes of memory because of a leak, but because it makes the back button super duper fast! And since memory is so cheap these days and everyone has a ton of it,
Ack! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe if you're a web developer. My whole OS doesn't use half a gig of memory!
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Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Informative)
The claim I _have_ seen made is that leak bugs would be easier to fix if people actually provided some idea of how to reproduce the leak (e.g. which sites they visited in the process of leaking). At some point David Baron wrote an extension that allowed collecting such data automatically, and the results from this led directly to a number of leaks being fixed in Gecko 1.9.
The other issue Gecko 1.8 had is that it had several leak scenarios that particularly hit AJAXy apps. With the growth in the number of such apps, the leaks became more serious. Gecko 1.9 fixes those issues.
Try the beta. You might like it.
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None of this is _good_. It's just a statement of fact.
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Funny)
"I can reproduce it. First logon to 'www.bigjugs.com', then I click the link to 'charlene' and I see a page of 500 thumbnail images. I click on each one in turn until about after image 220..... uerrmmm.. nevermind, I think I'm not sure I can reproduce it, there's just a memory leak that I saw once, umm maybe it has something to do with the back button code?"
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And then Slashdot collectively declared it to be the official response, and repeated it over and over ad nauseum until people believed it. Kind of like the "Acid2 only tests error handling" misconception that came up several times earlier today, even though if you actually look at the description of the test, it's only one aspect among many.
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Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface.
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Not only that, but there are two sizes to deal with for images: compressed and uncompressed. A 100x100 pixel JPEG might take up 7K of file space, but that's 100*100*24 bits = 30K. I seem to recall reading that one of the changes they made to save memory in Firefox 3 was to drop the uncompressed copy of the image after a certain amount of time, since you can always re-extract it.
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100k? You only wish!
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface.
I'm a web developer. Like most professionals I optimize my images for the web, and get them down to sizes which don't add up to the figure you seem to think they do. Most developers do the same. Javascript libraries are text, they're not all that big. The vast majority of sites don't even use iframes.
Typing the words "web page" into Google (first term that came into my head) brings up the following sizes for the first pages returned (44k, 52k, 13k, 17k, 76k, 12k, 37k, 52k, 21k). The definition of pa
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox isn't just remembering some HTML code and images, that's what the cache is for, it's remembering the STATE of the web page. When you hit the back button, it (usually) remembers what you've entered in the form, where you were scrolled to on the page, etc. It remembers the page as it was when you left it so it doesn't need to render it all over again. This includes rendered CSS, Javascript states, uncompressed images, the DOM tree (as the GP mentioned). They wouldn't be able to call it "Instant Back" if it had to render the page again, because that wouldn't be very instant.
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The definition of page size in this case is: "the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page, including the defining HTML file as well as all embedded objects (e.g., image files with GIF and JPG pictures)." Try it with as many terms as you want, I'm sure you'll get similar results.
How sure are you that I'll get similiar results?
I tried it with your terms, and didn't get similiar results at all.
http://www.google.com/search?q=web+page [google.com]
1) 230KB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_page [wikipedia.org]
2) 173KB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website [wikipedia.org]
3) 38KB: http://geocities.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
4) 317KB: http://www.steves-templates.com/ [steves-templates.com]
5) 189KB: http://www.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm [howstuffworks.com]
6) 263KB: http://www.wpdfd.com/ [wpdfd.com]
7) 199KB: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/frontpage/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
8) 112KB: http://www.webpages [webpagesthatsuck.com]
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would take a really bad OS to make memory fragmentation a problem, since memory address pointers are virtualized (IE I'm talking about how process A can't access process B's memory and how the same numerical pointers in each point to different memory locations). Even Windows isn't that bad. Besides, the only performance metric any kind of fragmentation can really affect is speed, never size.
Or is this some misnomer or am I misunderstanding this?
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Actual memory addresses aren't. If you allocate 1,000 pages, free a few in the middle, and try to allocate another thousand contiguous pages, you won't get them a few from here and a few from there.
I'm sure it's possible to stitch together a byte here, a byte there, and so on in your VMM, but that would be a lot of overhead and you'd need to be pretty good at packing algorithms to ma
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Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows EventID 9582: The virtual memory necessary to run your Exchange server is fragmented in such a way that performance may be affected. It is highly recommended that you restart all Exchange services to correct this issue.
It happens quite a bit actually.
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I run Exchange servers, and yes, it means that the actual RAM (+ PF) is fragmented. It is not merely complaining about the page file.
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with memory fragmentation is that as firefox gets used it allocates memory for buffers then stops using some of that memory. The memory unused is too small to return to the OS and if a large amount of memory is needed then more is allocated sice none of the spaces are large enough to hold whatever object that needs the memory.
It's entirely possible that firefox would have 1/3 to 1/2 of it's memory unused at any given time.
Knowing that's the problem and fixing a problem as complicated as that are two different things unfortunatly
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With memory its the opposite. Blocks are ALWAYS allocated in complete chunks. So the smallest holes never get filled. -Free Memory- gets fragmented instead of data, and because small bits of mem
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C++ has everything to do with it. Since C++ allows programmers to use actual pointers, it cannot run an automatic garbage collector and memory compactor in the background. This is because it would have to update pointers referring to data areas moved during compaction to reflect the new location, but it wouldn't know what memory elements are actually pointers, which makes this impossible.
This is why Java-style (C#-style, Python-style, whatever) references are good. They don't point to any real memory, but
Why so many leaks? (Score:2, Interesting)
The old cross-platform coding guidelines (Score:3, Informative)
While that doesn't rule out Resource Allocation Is Initialization (RAII) - a standard C++ memory management tool - it does make it a lot more labor intensive, by requiring special code to be written for each type of object that's managed.
With templates being allowed, one can use the standard library auto_ptr, as well as reference counted smart pointer templates.
Re:The old cross-platform coding guidelines (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure why it's "heinous" advice to say "avoid writing code that won't compile and will have to be backed out"...
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Let's see... OS/2 and HP-UX come to mind, at least if you cared about performance and the like.
And if we're talking about templates, GCC's support was pretty bad too, at the time. In fact, it wasn't until the switch to GCC 3.x that life got a little better on that front. egcs 2.95 was a bit of a mess in all sorts of ways.
No one's arguing the guidelines don't need revising. They do. But when they were written they made perfect sense. You have to keep in mind
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Re:Why so many leaks? (Score:5, Informative)
To the best of my knowledge, Firefox typically does not leak memory, at least in the conventional sense that references to memory are erroneously discarded and unused allocated memory cannot be freed. Instead, the actual heart of the issue is supposedly memory fragmentation:
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ [pavlov.net]
As the linked article suggests, memory fragmentation can be reduced by replacing heap allocations with stack variables, where possible, in hotspots such as the JavaScript engine. As for the heap allocations that cannot be dealt away with in this manner, effort can be made to group them together such that they are less likely to cause fragmentation.
Re:Why so many leaks? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is sloppy coding in some parts of the codebase (some of which are not actually used in Firefox, though; parts of the addressbook code in mailnews come to mind). The reference-counting system used in Gecko will leak in the presence of reference cycles (mitigated in 1.9 with the cycle collector). The reference-counting system and the GC-based JS engine don't play that nice together in some ways (again mitigated by the cycle collector; planned to be fixed in Gecko 2.0 by moving to a GC-based setup for the C++ as well). Extensions have been known to do silly things like holding onto all Window objects ever loaded in the browser (which of course prevents them from being GCed).
Some things you missed are memory fragmentation, plug-in leaks (only really solvable by putting plug-ins out-of-process), and unbounded growth of caches (there isn't much of this, but for completeness sake).
I like firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I like firefox... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
Overall, feels good and polished (Score:5, Informative)
It's interesting to see the new animated-ish tab movement on the tab bar (when you scroll the mousewheel over it) and the animation when things like 'Remember this password?' appear. They look pretty, but are slow on some crappy video cards -- would anyone know how these 'animation' effects can be disabled?
And, kudos to the Firefox team -- I've been using v3 Beta1 for some time, and the browser does feel snappier. Of course, I haven't loaded up my 4-5 'must-have' extensions (Adblock, TabMixPlus, SwitchProxy, DownloadThemAll mainly, sometimes YSlow) so it'll be interesting to see how v3 does in "real"-use scenarios.
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Re:Overall, feels good and polished (Score:5, Funny)
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I use delicious, but it isn't always as easy as opening a new window, clicking "bookmarks", right clicking the "Morning" folder and selecting "Open All in Tabs".
Also, via a domain, or a flash drive or however, it isn't that hard to roam with your bookmarks (or yes, as you say just use simpy etc.), but then again when I'm somewhere else I know what I wan
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looking forward to going back to firefox (Score:2)
Re:looking forward to going back to firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I do like the idea of using Konq full-time, but the extensions just aren't there. Meh.
Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:4, Insightful)
Those days seem long ago now. The project needs a top to bottom rewrite to deal with orders of magnitude more demanding usage of large numbers of tabs over days or weeks at a time.
Firefox needs to:
1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves
2) Bring the memory-performance balance up to par with other browsers
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
Tab 1: 35 megs
Tab 2: 50 megs
Extension 1: 500k
Extension 2: 100 megs == Zoinks!
Extension 3: 300k
So that memory/resource leaks can be readily identified, reported, and fixed.
The save active tabs option has helped to allow people shutdown and wipe the memory slate clean but that really is not a solution a decent piece of software should be forced to rely on.
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Your list of must have features are not end-user features. Why should the browser be bloated with what are debugging and profiling tools? To say that a product must have such features is to completely and utterly ignore the userbase and live in a coder-centric world.
Write a list of functional requirements that drive the above technical implementation details.
The "save active tabs" feature was added so that people could sa
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
They *are* end-user features, though. In Windows, you can open the task manager and see how much memory each task is taking up. Would you also argue that that is a bloated debugging feature? Is 'top' a bloat? Firefox is a little OS of its own, running multiple extensions and web apps, I don't see why a feature that's standard on every OS is so non-applicable to Firefox.
Since every instance of Firefox is different because of the extensions, the only way to figure out how to keep the memory usage down is by having these memory-reporting features available. It's a necessity, as much as it is on other platforms.
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that you only use those features when developing applications?! I use them on a regular basis, to see which application is slowing me down, to kill an unresponsive task, to see if it's time to reload Firefox
Again, I ask you to list the functional requirements for this feature.
I think the original poster described it well. But, to summarize: I'd want to see the list of apps that Firefox is currently running and their memory usage, and to be able to kill the misbehaving ones if they won't let me shut them down themselves.
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Now YOU are misrepresenting who end-users are. My wife, who is definitively not a geek by any standard and could hardly be described as a "power user", regularly uses the windows Task Manager to clean up / kill processes whenever her machine slows down, and I've observed a lot of other casual Windows users do the sam
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I would simply ask, what other browser has memory profiling built in? Can you open a window in IE and kill a stray activeX process or see how much memory its using?!?
Opera doesn't provide these features either.
I don't think IE is threaded by tabs, I'm sure safari isn't. I guess I don't see where firefox is so massively behind the other browsers. It doesn't use an inordinate amount of RAM, it is comparabl
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I see statements like this, I ask myself, "Has this person ever done any real software development?" Rarely does a project--especially one like Firefox--need a "top to bottom rewrite", regardless of problems it's having. Even when applications make the transition from one platform to another, they almost never require a total rewrite.
Posts like yours sound really informed, what with phrases like "implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves". The reality is that in addition to not knowing that a stack of existing bugs doesn't mean "it's time for a rewrite", phrases like the one I quoted are more vague than they will appear to those who don't know better. What does "threading between tab sessions and within tabs" mean, exactly? What operations do you want to see performed in separate threads?
Firefox doesn't need a top to bottom rewrite, but I think your post does.
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I don't know if this could be fixed without a rewrite but this shows really that FF needs more threading, and I think that it should provide better isolation using several process so when an extension crash the whole browser doesn't crash..
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"Threading between tab sessions" should be obvious - you use one thread for the abominably slow rendering job (yes, I browse Digg and Salon, why do you ask?) in one tab so that it doesn't prevent the user from interacting with the already rendered pages in other tabs. It seems like Firefox is at least trying to do some cooperative multitasking here, but that never worke
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
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on leaking (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it's late and I'm looking to nitpick, but "it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves" is a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications that I don't think are strictly true.
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It should be fast (Score:5, Insightful)
But I'm a Debian user, you insensitive clod! (Score:4, Informative)
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The only complaints I've seen about Iceweasel vs. Firefox (see, for example, posts in the "Software" section of the sidux.com forum) is that the Debian maintainer may not be doing a very decent job of bug-checking before uploading releases to the repositories. Other than that, everything (every extension, theme, bookmark, password, etc.) that has worked for me in Firefox also works on my Debian machines. It looks and acts exactly the same, including plugins.
Deleting meesa bookmarks (Score:2)
When was the last time IE did that? Sometime between "never" and "why don't you fire up that bong again?"
Awesome Bar (Score:3, Interesting)
It takes a couple hours to get used to, but it's simply fantastic. Kudos to the team that implemented it.
How could they miss this? (Score:2)
Am trying it now... (Score:2, Redundant)
Hell, if I were coding this stuff, I'
I only skimmed TFA but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this stuff may be considered trivial things to some people, but it strikes me as basic functionality. I would hope that Firefox won't make it to a third supposedly major version change without these kinds of things being addressed.
Modern attitude to bugs (Score:4, Insightful)
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug, and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong. Those, who aren't willing to put up with the hostility are not even deemed worthy of being a user — if you had a bug, you should've reported it!
But when a new release has (some of) the bugs fixed, the fixes are touted as a major leap forward. We are supposed to love the new version for all the fixes it includes — and ignore all the bugs, that the next version will be addressing...
Re:Modern attitude to bugs (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously, you aren't a developer. If you were, you'd know what they are dealing with.
You write some software, test it, and release it. You sink your heart and soul into it, you design it meticulously, and you are careful to leave the end-user in a position of strength - they can do whatever they want. You explain how to use it to the rest of your staff. They start training end users. Shortly, the calls start to flood back. How does NNN work? Why does "XXX" do that when you click on the button? And so on.
At first, you're all too happy to explain how NN feature works. But after a few years, while you're still explaining how feature NN works, you realize that you have documentation, notes on the website, an embedded help system, a features list, and a nice website that all explain the issue at hand.
You are willing to accomodate the fact that end users are not programmers. You ask for language, improvements, etc. that make it easier to understand what's going on.
But despite documentation and careful training, most calls I get are NOT bugs or problems, they are examples of the software doing exactly what it was supposed to do. I remember one support call I got that sounded like very serious data loss. The end-user denied seeing any error messages or anything by the program that would indicate any data loss. This end user went through several support staff before finally coming to me, the "chief tech weenie".
To avoid any ambiguity, I ran a Remote Desktop tool (VNC inside an NSIS installer) so that I could see what the end user was actually seeing. And right in the middle of the conversation, our software kicked up an error with a message that started with "PAY ATTENTION - YOU MIGHT LOSE DATA", which then explained the whole situation in pretty plain English. The end user was mid-sentence with me when this error popped up, and without skipping a beat, she clicked on the "ok" button. There was no pitch change, no pause, nothing in her voice. When I asked about the error message, she replied with "Oh, I see that all the time, and I just click OK".
So I had the fun of explaining to her that the message she hadn't bothered to read explained why she was losing data, and that the program had been laying out, to her, exactly what she needed to do so that everything worked as expected, and that she had been busy ignoring this safeguard, and that our product didn't kick up messages for the fun of it, etc...
I've even had the fun of having a user complain that they "aren't getting the latest features" of our product, only to find that when the update prompt came up, they were clicking "Cancel" without even reading the popup message.
I'm not saying that there aren't bugs that I find that are perfectly legit - but it's frustrating how many people assume that software will be sentient somehow and solve their problems for them, to the extent that they don't feel any need to pay attention to what's on the screen. They click OK, Cancel, red "X", or whatever to get the "annoying screen" out of their way so they can "get something done".
I've taken to kicking up windows that can't be dismissed unless they type some code, like: "I don't mind losing data" or "yes I want to delete this forever", or "I am liable for the information I'm about to lose". No, not that long, but you get the idea. If the end user can't dismiss the window without reading the message on it, maybe they'll read it.
Vista users are the worst - their O/S kicks up so many worthless messages they are truly desensitized to them.
Nowadays, I answer the phone politely but tersely, and I don't really bother to hide the fact that I have better things to do with my time. I go so far as to make sure that they have the right answer, then bail as quickly as I can without being openly rude.
Re:Modern attitude to bugs (Score:5, Funny)
I'm posting this (Score:2)
Too bloated... (Score:5, Funny)
Is the 'downloader' still a piece of shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that 3.0 did SOME changes to the downloader but how many? Is it just the UI or resume?
In FF 2.0 on a single core, p4 3ghz, if I open say a 1920x1200 JPG on a web site, then right click to save as, the ENTIRE BROWSER dies in the ass for up to nearly 10 seconds, it even does it on my heavily overclocked quad core machine at home (still 4 or 5 seconds)
There's something about that download box which just completely chugs machines.
Vertical tabs (Score:4, Interesting)
in FF3.
Memory Leaks - Plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to have really serious memory problems with Firefox. My memory usage would skyrocket very quickly, and I'd have to close it and reopen. This stopped a while ago when I installed FlashBlock. I rarely view flash anymore, and my memory footprint is rather stable. Right now I have VM Size of 403M - not small, but I have 4 windows and 97 tabs open. Have fairly few add-ons installed: DownloadHelper, FlashBlock, IETab, TabMixPlus and TalkBack.
I don't believe that memory leaks on Firefox are a problem, at least not on Windows. I think it is the plug-ins that are causing the problems.
Cheers,
m
How about . . . (Score:2)