Catalina has much improved since its initial version. My development MacBook now only crashes a few times a week rather than a few times a day. The Apple Catalina developers clearly know what they are doing. /s
Perhaps when the keyboard fails, someday, I’ll replace it, instead of just upgrading the RAM and drive.
Kidding aside, I would like to get a newer version someday with better screen resolution and size, but Apple seems to have many missteps to recover from the last 5 years or so.
I’m assuming an implied “/s” at the end of your comment.
Since getting High Sierra, everything's been really smooth, but the Sierra -> High Sierra upgrade actually bricked my computer. It was perpetually stuck in the installation phase, bailing after 45 minutes because it couldn't unmount my partition. To Apple's credit though, after I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS, everything worked and my data was intact.
I accept your point of view, but the GP was suggesting this is another in a long list of bugs introduced into Catalina. Since, anecdotally, I have first hand experience of this affecting me on other platforms as well as previous macOS versions, logic and reason suggest that the problem was not in fact introduced in Catalina, but lies squarely at the foot of Mozilla. Not everything is fair and balanced. I believe, in this case, that Mozilla are solely at fault, not any of the OS vendors/distributors.
Apologies if this comes across as tetchy; I've been dealing with pettiness and unreasonableness all day. My intention was not to defend Apple (or anyone else) or to besmirch Mozilla. I was merely trying to be helpful by pointing out that this problem affects the same software in the same way on different platform.
No OS should ever fall over because of a misbehaving application. That's one of their fundamental jobs, and failing at it is a defect. The fact that all the major OSes do doesn't vindicate them; nor is it particularly surprising that Catalina doesn't pull away from the pack. It is, however, disappointing.
That is one way of looking at it. I'd argue that it's not a particularly usefully of looking at it. Ideologies aside, your last sentence says a lot. The fact remains that buggy software from a cross platform vendor is causing this issue across the platforms they provide the software for. Be under no illusion, the issue is Mozilla's a no-one else.
Oh, and one of the times it crashed I distinctly recall setting it on the table too roughly and hearing a ping sound emanate from the closed laptop. When I opened the lid I saw the kernel panic screen. I'm chalking that one up to shock. It's been completely fine since though.
I’ve been using Macs since 1996 and have not experienced regular kernel panics on any of them since the early 2000s when I started using Mac OS X Public Beta. Your experience is frustrating but it’s the exception, not the norm. The fact that you can find other people, on forums like HN, who have also experienced problems is indicative of the selection bias of the Internet, nothing more.
Run the built-in hardware test, extended version. If it finds any fault, take it straight in for service. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257
If AHT shows no errors, clean install macOS. As in, wipe it totally, and reinstall. This is tedious but I expect Apple support will recommend it anyway. And if you've already done it, it might save time.
What kind of shock? It's not like they have spinning disks anymore.