06.17.09
Remixing John Gruber
Commenting on a post about iPhone apps, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes:
[J]ailbreak users expect everything to magically just work and will blame legit apps, rather than the hacks they’re running, for crashes.
Substitute “Users of InputManager hacks” for “Jailbreak users” and you have the bane of the Mac software developer’s existence.
Sadly, you can also substitute “Users of NPAPI plug-ins” for “Jailbreak users” and “legitimate browser plug-ins” for “hacks” and explain most web browser (and many web view-using application) crashes, which are the bane of the web browser developer’s existence.1
1 Simmons’s final lament is just as true for web browsers as it is for non-browser applications that use a web view. ↩
June 18, 2009 at 12:45 am
To be honest, you could probably drop any qualification on users – if they’re applying some kind of unsupported (and unsupportable!) hack to a system, it’ll always be the system at fault, never the user…
June 18, 2009 at 3:20 am
Assuming the last bit is tongue-in-cheek (hooray for internet voice!
), that’s probably true.
The pernicious element to the two cases I mentioned (and which I meant to include in my actual post—oops!) is that the latter case actually involves a legitimate add-on mechanism and the former case often involves authors blurring or omitting the facts just enough to make the average user think the hack is a legitimate add-on. I think it’s hard to argue that jailbreak users don’t know they’re performing unsupported operations and need to hold themselves responsible for the resulting misbehaviors and crashes. Most InputManager (and similar) hacks, on the other hand, pose as “regular old software” to users instead of making it clear they are unsupported hacks, so many users never realize that. In those cases, it’s harder for the user to know where the blame belongs, so the host application is the obvious choice.
In the end, it’s deeply frustrating to read anonymous user comments telling you your software sucks when the associated crash report shows a plug-in (or hack) doing the crashing; I wonder if plug-in vendors would fix more bugs if they had to read all these comments attached to their crashes?