> The number of minor issues that Firefox and Chrome have broken in their rapid updates is vast.
What exactly has lead you to this conclusion? As a professional web developer for a high volume website, I can't remember a single instance of Chrome breaking any html/css/javascript on our site between updates. That's not to say it doesn't happen, it just seems really rare and minor...
What kind of site do you develop that users are constantly complaining that things are breaking due to Chrome updates? I've never heard this be made as a sincere complaint before.
Please see my other posts in this thread for some examples.
The case I was specifically thinking of in that case was the Firefox bug that broke Java applets a few weeks ago, and with them everyone's web apps that use the technology as part of their UI.
It seems like everything you're talking about seems very specific to the kind of web work you do. As a professional web developer, I've never had these kinds of problems due to Chrome's or Firefox's rapid release schedules, and I've never heard complaints of it from other web devs.
And the specific case you mention here is also something that could happen in a longer-term release; rapid-release lets you fix it faster.
It seems like everything you're talking about seems very specific to the kind of web work you do.
Not being able to draw rounded corners properly is unique to "the kind of web work I do"? Yanking an entire video codec -- and probably the most popular one in the industry -- is unique to "the kind of web work I do"? Screwing up the browser if someone loads a page containing a Flash or Java applet is unique to "the kind of web work I do"?
I'm honestly not sure at this point what it is you think I do or why you think it's somehow unique. I'm drawing on several projects and more than one client I've worked with here, and just about the only thing they have in common is that they involve building a web app rather than just designing a static page. There must be many thousands if not millions of guys doing similar jobs, and I'm far from the only person to report any of the issues I mentioned.
And the specific case you mention here is also something that could happen in a longer-term release; rapid-release lets you fix it faster.
Except that if your rapid release cycle doesn't allow enough time for adequate QA then it is far more likely that you will ship broken code, and in the plug-in case the breakage was so severe that they pushed an out-of-band patch to correct it anyway. The rapid release cycle may well have contributed to causing the problem and certainly did nothing to help fix it in that case.
> Not being able to draw rounded corners properly is unique to "the kind of web work I do"?
This one I just don't understand because, ostensibly, your argument is that you have to down-code for browsers that don't support new features yet, but this is a feature that rapid-release browsers support that others didn't for a long time... It's also a trivial rendering issue and doesn't break anything if not working.
Yes, the codec problem seems specific. Most web video is handled by Flash, not the browser itself. If you're using it, you're trying "cutting edge" stuff which I thought is what you were saying isn't important to have...
And the Flash/Java issue you mentioned happened in an "LTS" release, which means that it's specifically the version of Firefox that does (supposedly) get adequate QA before release because it's only updated about once a year, with the goal of it being more stable. So it seems this kind of thing is just as likely to happen either way.
> I'm far from the only person to report any of the issues I mentioned
I'm not saying these things didn't happen or weren't reported by others, I'm just saying that the things that apparently happen frequently for you due to rapid-release have almost no effect on the greater internet. It seems like you're saying it's something that's bad for everyone, when really it seems it's just pretty crappy for your situation. In reality, rapid release is by far a net positive.
What exactly has lead you to this conclusion? As a professional web developer for a high volume website, I can't remember a single instance of Chrome breaking any html/css/javascript on our site between updates. That's not to say it doesn't happen, it just seems really rare and minor...
What kind of site do you develop that users are constantly complaining that things are breaking due to Chrome updates? I've never heard this be made as a sincere complaint before.