However, in fairness, if I look at all of the software that I use regularly in a professional capacity today, then it is clearly Google products that are the most buggy, and by a very wide margin.
It's more likely that you just spend more time using Google software than other software. When I worked at BofA, our website was down for an entire week because of a bad push. No online banking for a week. That's pretty much the standard for the industry. I don't doubt that there are bugs in Docs or Chrome, but they are relatively obscure. That's the nature of software, not every bug is caught by a unit test and users end up seeing them and reporting them. (Oddly, we use Docs heavily at Google, and the only bug that I've noticed is the "Your zoom level is not supported one". I haven't personally hit any other issues.)
But like I said in my original post, if you know how to develop bug-free software, I'd love to hear how. Expecting low-cost web apps to be as reliable as airplane control systems is unrealistic.
It's more likely that you just spend more time using Google software than other software.
Sorry, but I'm really not. In the case of Chrome, for example, I would routinely test new work on web projects in all the major browsers. I am writing this with some empirical data in front of me, because I've just checked the bug tracking systems for a couple of projects I work on to be sure: for both projects, excluding mobile browsers, Chrome has been responsible for a clear majority of all defects where the root cause was found to be a browser bug over the past two years.
I don't doubt that there are bugs in Docs or Chrome, but they are relatively obscure.
Respectfully, if they were that obscure, my colleagues and I wouldn't keep running into them on multiple projects. I'd agree that the particular symptoms of any particular bug are usually a corner case: set this option to A and that option to B and it breaks, but other combinations work OK. It's the way that several of these bugs have recurring themes that betray both an underlying architectural weakness and a lack of effective quality control that I find most unfortunate.
Using Chrome as an example again, it is clearly aggressive with caching and conservative with repainting, but sometimes that means it is simply not behaving properly at all. If I set a part of the DOM to display instead of being hidden and then send an AJAX request, I want my "please wait" message displayed while the request is running, not afterwards, or indeed not at all since it probably gets hidden again as soon as the response arrives.
That's the nature of software, not every bug is caught by a unit test and users end up seeing them and reporting them.
And as I mentioned, several of those bugs in Chrome had been reported, and subsequently closed without the root cause ever being identified and fixed.
Expecting low-cost web apps to be as reliable as airplane control systems is unrealistic.
I don't expect Google's software to be as reliable as airplane control systems, but somewhere close to as reliable as everyone else's software would be nice. I appreciate that you're having trouble believing it or reconciling it with your own experience, and I've already acknowledged that my experience might be a complete outlier, but I'm looking at several years of empirical data across multiple completely different projects and development teams and it is quite clear that the Google products I'm looking at here haven't been keeping up lately.
See issue 104487 for one recent example. An issue was flagged up where HTML5 videos weren't playing properly when given a poster image but no controls attribute.
The issue was closed almost immediately, with some obviously hastily written comments, apparently because no-one could reproduce it in a different version of Chrome on Linux or Mac. As far as I can see, no-one even tried to reproduce the other reported failing case on Windows, and there was no attempt at all to investigate the original bug and determine how it happened and why it was no longer observable on the platforms tested.
The issue was simply marked "fixed", despite no actual fix having been identified, rather than giving it a more specific "no longer reproducible" status.
There are still serious problems with that combination of attributes today.
It's more likely that you just spend more time using Google software than other software. When I worked at BofA, our website was down for an entire week because of a bad push. No online banking for a week. That's pretty much the standard for the industry. I don't doubt that there are bugs in Docs or Chrome, but they are relatively obscure. That's the nature of software, not every bug is caught by a unit test and users end up seeing them and reporting them. (Oddly, we use Docs heavily at Google, and the only bug that I've noticed is the "Your zoom level is not supported one". I haven't personally hit any other issues.)
But like I said in my original post, if you know how to develop bug-free software, I'd love to hear how. Expecting low-cost web apps to be as reliable as airplane control systems is unrealistic.