Everything's broken and nobody's upset

The key point is who defines what "opportunity" is and, most importantly, why. There are opportunities to build new features, or opportunities to fix what's broken.

  Do you really think that the guys as Apple/Google that pull 
  all-nighters and work themselves to death to finish   
  iOS/Android don't have "enough passion to fix problems"?

Honestly, I believe their managers give new tasks the a higher priority and that there is a pervasive mentality among all the profession that these are "irrelevant" problems that everyone has become accustomed to put up with and, in addition, are boring to work on.

   Who is gonna make those "low hanging fruit" interesting for a volunteer to work?

The pride on creating a mighty fine piece of software should do it. I actually DO try to attack all the user facing (annoying) bugs on my projects, always. I may or may not be successful at that, but I'll never use "we are much better than 15 years ago" as an excuse. And I'm certain you and I have both seen well designed and executed pieces of software, where care has been taken on the UX and have very few if any of these problems, so complexity isn't something that forces you to have annoying UX bugs.

The bottom line is that I feel it's disrespectful to a user to tell him to put up with the annoying "life-wasting five minutes at a time" bugs, only because 60 years ago he would have been playing cards over candlelight instead of trying to sync his iTunes library.

It's like starting to pierce people with a pin and when they complain say "be grateful this is not the medieval times, because the pin would be a broadsword and you'd be already dead."

It's just using past progress to justify current mediocrity. We should accept that those bugs that affect UX are indeed very important, and not dismiss them.

Have you even thought how much better things would be if people actually gave this a higher priority?

About Mozilla, there are lots of things that went wrong, and not many of them were due to fixing UX annoying bugs.

Not to plug or anything, but our Miele dishwasher is still working fine after 18 years, and the clothes washer only required a cheap fix a couple years ago.

That said, they're definitively more expensive. We only got them because they came with the house.

When I make software on my own, I really care about every detail and I'm focused on making my users happy. I'm thinkng in both low level and the big picture.

When I do software for money I often just want to quickly do what's required from me. My motivation is more "getting it done" and less "making user's happy". I'm thinking "how to implement requirenment A" instead of "how to best solve user's problem A". Another big factor is that I don't have full responsibility. If some parts of the UI can be improved I often don't care - I'm not responsible for that, convincing my manager that the UI sucks just isn't worth it.

Everything's broken and nobody's doing anything

Surely somebody's doing something! I'm sure if you look around you'll find a lot of people doing a lot of things to fix software quality and improve user experience in software applications.

But, consider what's really broken in the world: food supply, resource depletion, pollution, poverty, crime, violence, war... When I read a title like, "Everything's broken" those are the problems that come into my head. And so, I was disappointed to read your list. It didn't aim high enough for the problems I was considering.

Makes me feel one component what's broken is our priorities and focus. Clearly the priority and focus for the software you're using is not on quality and experience. It seems the software industry has optimized to get-product-out and iterate asap. Ship!

But then, when I consider the larger question of "what's broken?" where I look at the real issues in the world, I come to the same answer: the priority and focus of society is not tilted strongly enough towards fixing those types of big-world problems. Instead, we have so many of our great minds attacking other types of problems.

Generally, when we humans focus and prioritize, we can achieve just about anything we desire.

I don't think it's so much technical difficulty as much as it is that you are dealing with metrics that are hard to pin down. For example, how frequently should the UI code be called out to?

I guess that would depend on the speed of the computer it is running on. If it's a very slow computer then stuff is just going to be slow whatever you do , doesn't mean it's crashed.

Otherwise you'd end up with a situation where you have to say "sorry , your computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements to view this webpage".

Also expectations are going to differ depending on the use case. For example if I load up a huge 1GB spreadsheet I can live with the fact that the spreadsheet program is going to be unusable for a minute or two while it loads the data. On the other hand if I click on a link and the page on the other end has a buggy flash applet or whatever then having my browser suddenly lock up is way more frustrating.

I suppose part of this stems from the fact that sometimes a browser is a document reader and sometimes it's an application runtime but there's no way to tell which it should be for a particular page. You could add a header or something but that would just get horribly abused.