Today, more than half of my open tabs disappeared in an instant, and were not even an option to re-open until either I waited around ("up to six hours...") or manually installed the workaround. All of my in-progress work in any of those tabs? Gone.
That absolutely qualifies as crippled usability. The mere fact of such a thing being possible is a usability defect. On what basis do I trust that my work is not going to disappear on me like that again?
Firefox will continue to have bugs. All software will continue to have bugs. I'm so sorry that you lost some tabs in your browser but shit really does happen and acting like this is some violation due to overzealous security controls is inane.
I did not say "all trust". Please don't presume to inflate my explicitly stated position — especially while also minimizing the impact this incident had on me, and others. I did not merely "lose some tabs"; those, I could just re-open. I lost work. That data, effort, and time are gone.
If you think this clownshoery hasn't cost Firefox any trust, then you're being as naïve as you accuse me of being "absurdly overdramatic" and "inane".
Bugs are a thing, totally conceded. Sloppy certificate management is, too, but it's an entirely other class of thing. Deliberately conflating them is at least as disingenuous a debating tactic as pointing at Chrome, which is utterly irrelevant to this incident. That's straight-up "whataboutism".
Full stop, this was foreseeable. This was preventable.
EDIT: Phrasing.
EDIT 2: I won't respond further to the same kind of tone.
Alright, I apologize for the tone. It's unnecessary to make something like this into a heated discussion.
That said, the part I was referring to is:
> The mere fact of such a thing being possible is a usability defect. On what basis do I trust that my work is not going to disappear on me like that again?
The possibility of a bug happening is hardly a usability defect in my mind. Or if you want to call it one, it seems like a perfectly reasonable one - this was a defense born out of necessity when malicious extensions were more of a problem.
And I think that the "On what basis" question definitely implies a total lack of trust, but sure, maybe not. The basis is that this is a single instance of a failure over the course of the features' lifetime, for a feature that has existed for absolutely ages.
I pointed to Chrome as an example of similar issues cropping up across codebases to show that these sorts of bugs do happen. I don't consider that whataboutism.
All bugs are foreseeable and preventable. Systems are complex. I think you're putting the issue in a very unfair light, even though it's very reasonable to be upset about time and effort that is lost because of the issue.
First, thank you for responding in a manner that invites a response, rather than demands refutation.
I understand your perspective, and appreciate your recognition of my own. That said, if you think I'm putting the situation in an unfair light, I think you're downplaying it at least as much.
In my eyes, this is no mere "bug"; it's an abject process failure. As a reply to another of my comments in this discussion suggests, this is more on the level of, "Oops, we forgot to renew our domain name...", than it is, "Gosh, we didn't validate the pointer returned by the frobnitz function, when the whoozle isn't initialized yet..."
Dealing with expiring certificates before they expire is covered in like the second week of Certificate Management 101, as it were. If it's necessary to stick an intermediate cert in there, then it's doubly so to keep it current.
> The basis is that this is a single instance of a failure over the course of the features' lifetime, for a feature that has existed for absolutely ages.
The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but an existence proof is an existence proof. That the problem has gone from zero occurrences to one, no matter over what period, literally makes it infinitely more likely to recur, if you want to be that reductive...
