“Why reporting bugs to Apple may harm software quality – The Eclectic Light Company”
The quality of Apple’s software deteriorates with every release. Bugs languish for years. Small features, like search indexing of some file types, break.
These aren’t minor bugs either. Michael Tsai has been documenting a serious data loss bug in Apple Mail that is still unfixed after a year and a half in the wild.
This is as good a theory as to why this is happening as any other I’ve heard.
The only software team at Apple that stands above the rest is the Safari team, which seems to deliver software at a much higher standard than the rest. Which makes the Chrome team’s claim that Apple is deliberately sabotaging Safari development by starving the team of resources all the more annoying: it’s clearly Apple’s highest performing flagship software team.
That Safari seems to do better supports the process thesis in the original blog post. Safari has an open source library at it’s heart and works with open standards. It has to use a different process, one that clearly works better than what takes place at the rest of Apple.