IndustryGoogle Reader Bug Swatting

Google Reader Bug Swatting

Quick post from the Official Google Reader Blog – they’ve swatted some bugs in the product. On the most part, these are those small, but very irritating bugs that make a utility less enjoyable to use. It’s a real miscellany as you’d expect, but includes things such as searching for feeds using keywords now works in Opera, the scrolling position is now always reset when moving between feeds or folders. The “none” color scheme for publisher clips now works, keyboard shortcuts in Internet Explorer should continue to work after using “gt” or “gu” (the tag and subscription selectors) and so on.

I’m glad to see that the Google engineers are doing their best to improve the product, but I’ve got two observations that will label me as less than charitable.

Firstly, in the announcement they say “Being an engineer isn’t always about working on fun new features — sometimes there are bugs that need to be fixed before anything else can happen.” (My emphasis.) Having worked with engineers developing and improving products surely the point is that bugs need to be fixed because they ARE bugs and detract in some way from the product, not because they stop you doing something more interesting? The implication is that Google is prepared to leave bugs in products until and unless forced to fix them because of development plans; but I could be being far too pedantic here and mis-reading a comment.

Secondly is there any chance that the engineers working on Google Reader could be loaned out to Google Search, because there are a few long standing bugs there that need fixing, though since they only affect users rather than development plans they’re considered low priority?

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