Imagine you work for one of the world's largest Web sites, a site that values its community so much that it will move heaven and Earth to avoid pissing off anybody at all...because historically, pissed-off community members take their gripes to the press, which makes a huge deal out of anything that goes wrong at the big high-profile Web site.

The result is a policy that every browser ever made, running on any computer ever made, must provide a flawless user experience. The consequential result is that every one of the hundreds of developers at this company is given a quota of bugs to fix; and because the company is so fanatic about quality, the bugs that slip through invariably show up on the most obscure combinations of old computers and old browsers.

As part of my initiation (synonymous with "hazing"), I was given all the bugs generated by Internet Explorer 4.5 running on old Macintoshes with OS9 and earlier. I have no debugging tools on that old computer, so I walk across the building to an old Mac to test things, then walk back to my Windows PC to try a fix. Then I walk across the building...hour upon hour of this. I'm sure both people using this combination were just as pleased as can be when I made the little Javascript error popup go away. Whoopee. I figure it would've been more cost-effective to just buy both of them a new computer.

I've also been assigned the Netscape Nagivator 4 bug. Have to fix it--the neighbor of the CEO uses it. Luckily there are no WebTV bugs in the queue at the moment...I'm sure I'd get any if they were reported. Can't slight WebTV: The CEO's other neighbor uses WebTV.

And then there's regression testing. My bug fixes are in QA, and I'm dreading the news that my fix for Mac/IE 4.5 broke all the thousands of other combinations of computers and browsers out there. Nothing'll put you in the doghouse faster than bringing down a site used by millions of people every day.

Imagine the complexity of a huge body of JavaScript which has been patched for nine years with special-case fixes for different browsers and computers.

Count your blessings...