Apple’s declining software quality

Re:Apple’s declining software quality by pekk on Friday February 05, 2016 @01:56AM (#11040011)

A lot of people in this thread seem to think this is all about Apple not adding enough revolutionary features or something. But consider this alternate explanation: with years of experience comes a more sophisticated judgement. What used to seem good enough now seems to have obvious flaws, even if it the same as it was before. Lack of control is an example: beginners often don't notice or care much, especially if it feels simpler, but as your needs deepen it becomes more important. Being able to set things up and then not keep touching it is one of those tastes that develop with experience.

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Re:Apple’s declining software quality by vonklaus on Friday February 05, 2016 @02:38AM (#11040127)

that is a good point as well. I definitely agree with it. The one thing I would add is that I repeatedly get update notifications on my iPhone. Due to the increase in lockdown of all features, I am legitimately afraid to update as the:

* provides security update

* increases iTunes performance

type descriptors, do not provide enough information about how they will fundamentally change my system. Most notably when I updated my iPhone and found out I loaded in some horribly inefficient talking pseudo AI that was not neutral, but a straight up negative feature consuming system resources.

I think you are really correct though, as you gain more experience and skill with technology you have more needs and better judgement. You can evaluate things better because you are aware of what is possible. The biggest problem isn't that they make changes, it is that those changes are not predictable so they become difficult to mitigate.

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Re:Apple’s declining software quality by chris_wot on Friday February 05, 2016 @03:59AM (#11040360)

I'm also concerned about updates. For instance, I'm currrently having to route all my iPad web traffic via Charles proxy to remove any instances of style="overflow:hidden;" in a body tag are cleared out.

Why? Because in iOS 9.2 Apple released it with a bug that causes the viewport to zoom incorrectly on these web pages. This affects LibreOffice's OpenGrok, which I browsed regularly on my iPad.

They still haven't fixed this, and it's a major regression. iOS updates are few and infrequent. Consequently I'm seriously questioning what their updates actually do to my iPad and iPhone.

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Re:Apple’s declining software quality by noinsight on Friday February 05, 2016 @06:10AM (#11040740)

I wouldn't hold my breath. The iOS Mail app can not negotiate any TLS version above 1.0 (for IMAP, possibly SMTP too) even though it obviously supports TLS 1.2 because it sends a TLS version of 1.0 in the ClientHello message even though that same message will contain TLS 1.2 ciphers (AES-GCM).

I reported it in October and Apple's security team replied they're aware of it but it's still not fixed 2 releases later even though they probably need to fix like 1 line of code (the advertised version flag).

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Re:Apple’s declining software quality by chris_wot on Friday February 05, 2016 @06:17AM (#11040760)

They have actually fixed it - if you get bit with it then you can reference rdar://problem/22242515

The WebKit bug is here:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=1528...

The patch to fix it is here:

https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=268394&action=diff

The workaround, FWIW (thanks Simon!) is to add shrink-to-fit=no” to the meta viewport tag.

For me, it was too much effort to get OpenGrok fixed, so I just did a rewrite rule in Charles Proxy that gets rid of the style attribute.

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