this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Maybe it would be easier to reframe the conversation.
Imagine that you live in a city that has a garage that gives away free cars. Most people get one and it works perfectly fine, but sometimes people modify them and it causes issues with the engine, nothing major but it’s a minor inconvenience. Maybe turning the car off and on again resolves it.
When said people have issues and talk about it, people ask them questions like “what changes did you make?” and “what kind of issues are you having?” with the idea of trying to help them, and maybe they’d suggest things like “try checking the on board diagnostics” or “check the spark gap” to try and help.
Don't you see how saying, “I just expect it to work without having to do any homework or spending any time trying to fix it. I’m not a mechanic.” is kind of absurd in that situation?
It’s totally unreasonable to expect extremely complex software to always just work with zero bugs, even if you pay $$$$ for it. People can expect it to “just work” all they want - and for Firefox, it does. If you’re adding third party addons that break it, then you don’t have a Firefox problem, you’ve got an addon problem.
If you don’t want help, you don’t need to post about it. Being honest, you just seem pretty entitled to me, and I’m not trying to insult you, I just genuinely don’t understand what you expect with regards to your own situation. You say that you’re happy with the workaround you have but also that you think it should be fixed and you think it’s a problem with the OSS community that someone tried to help you to get it fixed? I just do not get it.
Yeah, no, I'm actively saying just that.
I'm actively saying that when most people hear a little noise under the hood they do one of two things: ignore it or take the car to a mechanic and use a different transport method for a bit until it's fixed.
I'm saying that if somebody casually mentions "my car does a little noise" over the watercooler and the other person goes "hey, have you popped the hood and checked the spark gap" or "can you pull up the on board diagnostics and maybe we can go over them now?" the usual reaction is to make up some excuse or get glassy eyed and move on with your day.
That is absolutely how that goes.
And no, it's not optimal or even particularly reasonable, but that's the thing, it doesn't have to be. When the average person engages with a market product for fun or casual usage they are often willing to invest zero effort in improving it from the out of the box experience, at least early on. And that's their prerogative. That low barrier to attrition is a key element of UX design, and it absolutely applies to technical issues.
So what you’re saying is, when you say “oh I’m having performance issues in Firefox”, you think it would be better for everyone to just ignore you, than for people to try and help you?
Given that I didn't ask for any help, yeah.
Or, you know, add some polite commentary, chime in with whether that matches your experience or not. That sort of phatic engagement stuff, if one really must chime in.
I mean, you always expect some level of "have you tried this". Hell, I didn't even begrudge the nod to the built-in profiler. That was a fair point.
By the time you get to "look at the extensions you don't recognize, you may have accidentally installed a cryptominer" you may be overdoing it, though. Unless I'm your grandma or you're actively manning a customer service call center.