[CentOS] Speaking of firefox...
Warren Young
warren at etr-usa.com
Wed Feb 12 23:03:55 UTC 2014
On 2/12/2014 15:04, me at tdiehl.org wrote:
>
> I guess it is hard to get it tested without making
> it the default.
No need to guess. There's plenty of evidence that at a certain point,
software needs to be battle tested to shake the last bugs out.
Take btrfs. It's been included in shipping kernels for 5 years now, yet
people keep asking "...but is it stable?" Why does the question come
up? Because it isn't the default filesystem. Since it isn't installed
on $BIGNUM percent of all existing Linux boxes, there is room for
ignorance to sprout into doubt.
Firefox's PDF reader problems are certainly not all "bugs," per se. PDF
is a huge bag of complex features only loosely related. I can't see
Mozilla even *wanting* to implement every last behavior and feature
defined by Adobe, much less accomplishing it. If your document depends
on an unimplemented feature of PDF, it won't render right, so you're
likely to call the viewer "broken," even if every feature Firefox's PDF
reader /does/ implement is flawless.
This isn't about Firefox and Adobe. It's about any software development
team who's set themselves the task of following the taillights of
another software development team, while the latter has a bigger revenue
stream. It's an inferior strategy, if your goal is to win the race.
Lots of examples of that:
- octave vs Matlab
- Libre/OpenOffice vs MS Office (document compatibility)
- Wine/ReactOS vs Windows
- SharpDevelop vs Visual Studio
- Gimp vs Photoshop (PSD compatibility)
If you're tempted to give "IE vs Firefox" as a counterexample, notice
that I specified a bigger revenue stream. It's a necessary
precondition. IE6 was leapfrogged by Firefox and Chrome because they
have an independent revenue stream, while IE does not. IE also has to
move around in legal leg irons that don't hobble the others.
Another non-counterexample: Linux vs big iron Unix. Big iron Unix
priced itself out of the segment of the market that was outgrowing the
economy as a whole. Now Linux calls the dance steps.
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