On 1 February 2010 23:44, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Schneelocke
<schneelocke(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe we should do the same - introduce bugs that
will cause subtle
> breakages on browsers we'd rather not go out of our way to
> specifically support any longer, and see if anyone'll actually
> complain. :)
People are really bad at complaining, especially web
users. We've had
prolonged obvious glitches which must have effected hundreds of
thousands of people and maybe we get a couple of reports.
Users appear to just hit the back button and move on, either they
don't care at all or they do care but assume it will be fixed without
their intervention.
What you propose is not a good policy, at least not in this application space.
Indeed. It works for X because a lot of the cruft was corporate bad
ideas from the early 1990s that they foolishly committed to supporting
forever, including things that *never worked*, *ever*. Breaking them
proved that nobody cared. The Xorg crew are desperately trying to drag
a horrible old codebase into the 21st century. The only reason your
Linux laptop works reasonably reliably is that the X codebase is very
seasoned, not that it's not horrible ;-)
Nevertheless, in our space it does require the people who advocate
support to do the testing and complaining when it doesn't work,
because, observably, no-one else is going to. As I said: applied
bloody-mindedness.
- d.