I guess I don’t really understand - can you help me understand your viewpoint? What do you think a good response would be? Just like, “oh yeah, that sucks dude?” Sorry if I made it feel like I was expecting you to do technical tasks, it was just an offer of help to get it fixed, but obviously if you’d rather not do that, you’re not compelled! Just trying to help really. I don’t know what the better response would be - I’m autistic so sometimes I miss social cues so sorry if that’s the case!
The point was a simple observation that the OSS community tends to confuse feedback for requests of technical support.
It’s not you in particular and it’s not mean spirited or wrong to do. It is, however, a relevant note on why some OSS struggles with reach.
My go-to example of this is that nobody cares that Blender is open source, but people tend to flag it for GIMP. Because Blender “just works” and has comparable UX and features to paid alternatives. I know what’s on GIMP or Krita and my comment isn’t a call for help, just an observation.
In this case… well, yeah, it sucks that Firefox has a long-standing performance bug. If it gets fixed in the future it’ll be fine. If it doesn’t I’ll survive, but it may put off some people from joining if the effective experience is less responsive than Chrome’s despite what benchmarks may say.
Thanks for the extra information, but I still think I’m missing something - what’s the reason behind providing feedback if you don’t want them to do anything about the feedback? Like, you’re just making conversation about it, like sharing funny bugs you had in Skyrim?
I guess there’s a difference between talking about bugs and UX, because if you said that you prefer Photoshop to GIMP because you think Photoshop’s UX is better, I totally understand that, and “tech support” isn’t really appropriate, but isn’t that different for people who are talking about their specific performance issues? Like, how would you want people to respond to that?
it may put off some people from joining if the effective experience is less responsive than Chrome
Isn’t that a reason for people to be more helpful in helping others resolve their performance issues and to raise bug reports as appropriate? I really feel like you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too, here - it feels like you want Firefox to fix performance issues, but you feel like the issues should be fixed without actually giving devs the information they need to fix them. That’s just not going to happen for any app/software, OSS or not
Isn’t that a reason for people to be more helpful in helping others resolve their performance issues and to raise bug reports as appropriate?
No, see, that’s my point. There’s a whole family of bugs where people don’t want to be told how to fix the bug themselves, they want the bug to never have happened in the first place. Or, you know, at best for it to be patched and removed without their intervention.
Showstopper bugs? Sure, those you just want a way to get past so you can do what you want to do, but experiential bugs, bugs that don’t block you but make things slightly more annoying? For most people any additional effort in fixing the bug just makes the bug worse at that point. Especially if it’s not an open-and-closed “just do this and it fixes it”.
A slight performance degradation over time that clears up with a reset is not that big of a deal. Being walked through debugging processes I’ve already tried that won’t actually fix the issue is an extra annoyance on top of having to deal with the bug. At best. At worst it feels patronizing, in that hey, I know what I’m doing, right? It’s annoying in the way calling customer support and having to go through the dumb easy part of the script where they tell you to turn the thing off and on again is annoying. Except I didn’t call customer service, I just complained about the bug and now people on the Internet are crawling out of their hideouts to do customer service at me.
So no, no every situation calls for trying to walk somebody mentioning a bug through basic QA processes. Software is supposed to just work, and for the average user, if you add homework on top of their software not working, that’s just extra incentive to not use the software. OSS fans sometimes miss that small but relevant part of the user experience.
