

Engineering Windows 7: What we do with a bug report? - tlrobinson
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/08/10/what-we-do-with-a-bug-report.aspx

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andreyf
Summary: we still can't reproduce the issue, but we're trying all kinds of
things.

Nice to see how a large organization handles these kinds of reports, but this
part really bothered me:

 _...one day unexpectedly Word started crashing for people. We hadn’t changed
anything. It turned out a new version of a popular add-in released and the
crash was happening in the add-in, but of course end-users only saw Word
crashing._

Yeah, stupid users. They only saw Word crashing... but wait, Word _was_
crashing. Sounds like there's a bug in the plugin system - just as
applications shouldn't crash the OS, plugins shouldn't crash an application.

Hell, GMail warns me about slowdowns when I load it with Firebug is enabled -
taking responsibility and acting on a _brower_ add-on which is affecting _a
web app's_ user experience seems the wiser way of dealing with issues than
blaming the user.

Summary of last part:

Please don't hate us, interwebs. You messed up Vista's PR glory, please don't
mess up Windows 7. Did we mention it might be a hardware problem?

~~~
swolchok
"Yeah, stupid users. They only saw Word crashing... but wait, Word was
crashing. Sounds like there's a bug in the plugin system - just as
applications shouldn't crash the OS, plugins shouldn't crash an application."

Let's suppose that, for reasons of performance and plugin developer
convenience, you really want plugins to run in-process. How do you propose to
prevent them from crashing the application?

~~~
fh
Let's suppose that, for reasons of security and integrity, that's a really
stupid idea?

~~~
rbanffy
Let's assume, from the current Windows security state of affairs, that this is
precisely what was done.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm not sure - besides the "I told you so" suggestion of having not done
something stupid like that, the only other solution is to fix a showstopper
crash is to issue a patch that will blacklist (and thus not load) the plugin,
and inform the user.

~~~
rbanffy
Perhaps, another solution would be to custom build a plug for blacklisted
extensions that isolates the main process better with some added processing
overhead, something like a "fake in-process" thing.

