Sucker for Alphas
Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Chromium just crashed on me, and while I’m waiting for the download of the latest nightly build to complete, I realized I’m strangely happy about this. If Safari had crashed on me, I’d be stewing over how annoying it was I had to lose a whole 30 seconds (or less) of my life to restart my browser. Instead, I think, “Oh cool, I’ll just download the next nightly.”
This isn’t unusual for me either. I run WebKit instead of regular Safari as well, though that’s extremely stable and hassle-free compared to Chromium. ((Also “running WebKit” basically means you’re just swapping out Safari’s rendering engine for the latest WebKit version. You still get all the aggravating sluggishness and bugginess of, say, Safari 4. So it’s really not the same thing.)) I remember back in the early days of OS X, I used the Chimera browser (which you may now know as Camino) from it’s earliest days as well. I liked Firefox at first too, but abandoned it when it actually became stable & good (and bloated, and ugly…).
Using Chromium is kind of a headache. Until very recently, it didn’t support Flash. Until the last few builds, Basic Auth didn’t work. It can now import my Safari bookmarks but offers absolutely no way to manage them, that I can figure out anyway (I suppose I could hand-edit some plist files somewhere?).
But I still use it & love it. For weeks several months back, uploading a file in Gmail (Gmail!) would crash the entire browser. Yes, the entire browser, not just that cool “tabs are independent processes so only the tabs crash” thing. I still used Chromium though, and would switch to another browser if I needed to use an attachment. Somewhere along the line, that got fixed, and now the flash upload indicator even works! Well, most of the time: it crashes a lot…but I get a cool notification that it crashed & a reload fixes it!
In other words, by merely doing what it’s supposed to do, even unreliably, it makes me happy. An established browser can just do what it’s supposed to do & make me mad because the dropdown menu looks funny or because I get a beachball for 2 seconds every time I open a new window. But when I’m using a product like Chromium, which is completely a work-in-progress, I not only tolerate the quirks but “cheer on the team” to fix them. When things get fixed, you feel like you were somehow a part of that—even if you’re the kind of lazy alpha tester like I am who doesn’t submit bugs let alone fix them. ((Although, in my defense, the one time I looked at Chromium’s bug tracker, all the problems I’ve found were well known already.)) Browser just crash? S'ok! The eternal hope of the Nightly That Fixes Everything keeps you going.
I think this mentality is a huge part of the reason so many open source projects thrive despite having obvious, deal-breaking shortcomings for most users. As a user, you create a completely different relationship to the software, and therefore, to the developers. So the fact that the primary way I use Google Chrome’s “New Tab” window is to click on the link to the latest nightly build doesn’t bother me. Actually, to be honest, I don’t even use that page anymore because I wrote a shell script to download and install the latest nightly for me:
I know, it’s a sickness. And look, my download’s finally done!