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Comment by Sirizarry | Hacker News Reader

A public beta does not and should not allow major breaking changes like this. Would you be satisfied as a manager or PM if this was released to the public under your watch? You’d be fired if this wasn’t an intentional change. If it’s not patched immediately then it’s a good assumption that this is an intentional change.

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Yes, beta software should be expected to be full of bugs and breaks. I know I'm going to sound like an old man ranting at clouds here, but I really do blame Google for this. Before Google release GMail "Beta" (which it was in for 5 years https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/after-five-y...) beta releases of software were widely understood to be very likely to be barely functional and full of many obvious bugs. The public beta release of OS X (the original beta release) was so slow and incomplete in so many ways that it was impossible to use as a primary OS, even if you discounted that it needed OS 9 and Carbon to provide a good chunk of your apps.

But Google dropped gmail "beta" on the world and then proceeded to release multiple other pieces of software all labeled "beta" and it seemed like suddenly "beta" just meant "software that might have updates that change things". Or even worse as more and more companies started releasing their own software under the "beta" label, it seemed to also take on a definition of "software that we want to release, but we don't want to claim is actually finished so that you can't give us crap if it doesn't have features / work the way you want". It got so bad that for a while it looked like "alpha" was going to become the new "beta" and some companies started doing public/developer "alpha" releases.

For Gmail, the general end user experience was polished enough (and realistically the web as a whole was buggy enough) that beta lost any sense of "warning here be dragons" and now we get these sorts of breathless panic articles every handful of years when bugs show up in developer betas for various pieces of software. Beta == very likely broken in some way, it always has and I'd really like to reverse this trend of thinking it doesn't.

It’s NOT a public beta. It’s a developer beta.

But either way your standard is betas should be bug free? Then why bother with betas at all.

My bad didn’t realize it wasn’t public.

I don’t expect betas to be bug free btw, but I do think a beta shouldn’t have such an obvious bug. This should’ve been caught before shipping the beta

> Would you be satisfied as a manager or PM if this was released to the public under your watch?

Yes.

You are overreacting. This is what beta software is for. Nobody is getting fired for a bug in a beta release.

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