> everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember
I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?
Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.
I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)
The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.
There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.
As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.
> ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...).
I have literally never had any of those crash, which is what I was writing about.
> some page layout issue, some text display, some translation
Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about.
I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't crash.
And Ryanair's app and website sucks, but it didn't crash on me.
Booking hotels is reliable enough I've done a 1000 km cycle ride where I booked each hotel en route 2-3 hours before arriving because I didn't know which village or city I would reach before that point.
Taxes I can no longer do online because the UK won't let me do their bit online now I live abroad and I don't trust my understanding of German tax terminology for the other bit so I have an agent, but that's a legal issue not a website limit, and I can't remember ever having had a problem with HMRC online.
Likewise, the biggest problem I've ever had with buying a travel pass digitally was 5.5 years ago, because BVG didn't support iPad (not a typo, my phone was a Blackberry and I had an iPad).
I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
> I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
This probably explains why we don't understand each other.
I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.
However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.
Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".
Real people call them "stuff that does not work".
And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".
It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.
But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.
I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?
Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.
I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)
The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.
There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.
As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.