Every bug becomes equally important over time
I was going to give some naff advice about "consider all common use-case scenarios very carefully before assigning a priority to a bug" before my left brain kicked in to tell me that "As the number of users of a product increases, so too does the number of use-cases. Every bug becomes equally important over time, as enough use-cases develop that intersect with the bug."
What led me to this was the following: I can finally consider switching to Firefox. Firefox 1.5 in particular. The reason? They've just fixed a bug that has prevented me switching. Essentially, if you navigated to a URL, and for whatever reason you couldn't get the page loaded, a blank page would result (and an error dialog). The problem was that you couldn't discover the URL of the page that you were trying to visit after the error.
My browser usage pattern is to use tabs. I read a page, it may have several links I'm interested in, and so I open them on separate tabs and continue reading. When I've finished with my current tab, I kill it, move on to the next, and repeat. So if some pages don't load...well, I've lost them. And that is unacceptable. It was also inevitable - until recently I lived on a 56k modem - timeouts, congestion, whatever. So now I can finally consider switching from Safari.
What's interesting is that this was not a show-stopper bug. But it was for me. It was probably not very interesting, technically, nor did it impact on many other aspects of Firefox. But it interrupted my usage pattern. It was a show-stopper for my common use-case scenarios. It was in the long tail.
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