I feel obligated to file bugs with Apple when I find them. There is a always a glimmer of hope that they will fix the issues in their next release, allowing me to clean up all the code hacks required to work around the bugs.
The problem with filing bugs with Apple is they go into some nebulous black hole. Here is the bug reporter. Once you log in and fill out that form, that is the last you will ever see of your bug. It goes into their internal system for triage.
The most common frustration for me is when Apple triages the bug and they find it is a duplicate of a bug they are already tracking. In this case you get informed that your bug is already being tracked, and they give you a reference of the existing bug. However you can't use that reference to lookup the bug details for the existing bug. It would be nice if you could at least verify that you agree its a duplicate! It also means you have no way to check up on status, possible workarounds, etc.
What really set me off was when iOS 6 beta releases came out. They went through all my bugs, marked them as fixed, and asked if I was still seeing the issues in the latest browser versions. It was obvious that they hadn't actually done any of their own testing on the updated browsers, and just wanted to farm out some work to me to get an easy update on the bug status.
Here is the actual update from Apple.
This is a follow-up to Bug ID# 10484538. Does this issue also occur in iOS 6.0 beta 2 (10A5338d)?
After installing the iOS 6.0 beta 2 release please update your bug report with the results.
Thank you for your time. We truly appreciate your assistance in helping us discover and isolate bugs.
Here is my reply.
This is not a follow up, this is delegation. You check, I already went to the trouble of creating very clear test cases, with embedded simple HTML pages that demonstrate the problems.
Of course my reply was not even acknowledged, and I will probably get a similar message with the next major update to the browser.
