< groan >
I'm not generally one to say “I told you so”. Ok, so you probably saw right through that big fat lie. I do it all the time and generally enjoy it. :)
Here's my favourite quote from the article:
"Backward compatibility with any kind of application development is kind of the holy grail of software problems that haven't been solved by anyone yet," Hofmann said. "(But) you try to respond quickly when it does happen."
While a difficult problem to be sure, I wouldn't go so far as to call it the Holy Grail. They broke a public Interface. If you want something sacred, it's the contract that a public interface represents. In that respect, many companies have done an extemely good job of maintaining backward compatibility.
Microsoft comes to mind. Say what you will about them, but the fact that I can load up a DOS based program on Windows XP or even on Win2K3 and have it just work is nothing short of astounding in my book. You can even get it to print to a USB printer if you're clever enough. The amount of testing Microsoft does to try and ensure compatibility is nothing short of staggering.
Sure, some things break. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the problem lies with the application, not Windows. The use of undocumented APIs is one practice that catches folks all the time. It's not a public Interface and therefore there's no contract and no expectation of compatibility. Some applications rely on behaviours that are considered bugs in the OS. Microsoft fixes the bug and the application breaks. Who's fault is that?
Here's my next favourite bit:
The latest changes also appear to have delayed the development of foreign-language versions of FireFox and Thunderbird. Version 1.0.5, which fixed a number of security problems, is available only in English.
Development teams building foreign-language versions have complained of a lack of "clear information" from Mozilla on the latest problems. The foundation has asked developers to skip localized versions of 1.0.5 and to build them instead for the upcoming version.
I don't have any actual statistics, but the general sense I get is that FireFox is really, really big overseas. Really. Right now, all of these folks are stuck on 1.0.4 with security problems and no release of 1.0.5 to fix them because it's broken too. Well, broken in the sense that the English version is broken and they're just going to go ahead and make everyone wait for 1.0.6 to fix all of the problems for everyone.
As I mentioned last time, the fast release cycle scares me. Wanna know what else scares me? This:
Alpha 2 also includes a feature that caches previously visited pages in memory for faster display when clicking the back and forward navigation buttons.
Dude. Lay off the Red Bull. Pages already get cached to disk. How much faster does it have to be? I know that it should be fine, but the fact that web page content will be resident in memory just gives me the willies. I really think it's a Bad Idea (tm)
You heard it here first folks - somebody is going to figure out how to exploit that.
Dave
Just because I can...