Surfin' Safari

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As some comments in my previous blog entry illustrate, I think people simply don't grasp the magnitude of the Web. There are (conservatively) 10 million Web sites on the Web. Let's say (conservatively) that each Web site has 50 unique Web pages. That's 500 million Web pages that the Web browser has to work perfectly on.

Let's imagine that the browser has done a fantastic job of emulating all the quirks of WinIE and Netscape 4, and that it is really good at laying out malformed HTML. An awesome browser would be (conservatively) 95% compliant, which means that it would have some sort of bug or problem on 5% of those 500 million Web pages.

5% of 500 million Web pages is 25 million malfunctioning Web pages. Let's now assume that only 10% of those Web pages are even seen by someone using Safari itself. Now we're down to 2.5 million pages seen by Safari users.

If only 10% of those users even bother to report a bug, that's 250,000 unique bugs that have to be screened.

This is the reality of the Web. People are constantly shocked and amazed that their pet bug hasn't been fixed in subsequent releases (e.g., in Mozilla or Safari), but those people simply don't understand how many hundreds of thousands of bugs their particular problem is competing with.

I love the tactics some people use when filing bugs. In particular the tactic of saying something inflammatory in order to goad the receiver of the bug into fixing it. You see this a lot in Bugzilla, and also in reported Safari bugs.

Here are some of my favorite phrases (for your enjoyment). Let X = the browser of your choice. Let Y = any other browser.

(1) The Promise - "The lack of this feature is the one thing that keeps me from switching to X."
(2) "I can't work under these conditions. I'll be in my trailer." - "I can't believe you broke this! That's it! I'm going back to Y!"
(3) Playing the EOMB Card - "How can this be broken? Every other modern browser gets this right."
(4) Impatience - "Months have passed, and this bug still hasn't been fixed! What's the holdup?"
(5) Overeagerness - "Still broken." (2 days later.) "Still broken." (2 days later.) "Feature still doesn't work. (2 days later.) "Broken in build from mm/dd/yy."

The Safari team has actually started using the term EOMB as a way of referring to all other modern browsers. ;)