Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure we were. I have video games that were pressed to CDs with no possibility of updates and they still run to this day. On a complete play through of many of them you wouldn't notice a single bug. Using users for QA has made us lazy and borderline incompetent.
I think you're thinking of extreme cases here like games which are released with bugs these days for holiday rush, because the patching is easy / built-in. That's not the case for everything and not the case for Firefox. And the stable software in the past may be due to nostalgia. They had bugs. Even before dialup was common, games were patched: Diablo 1 had a number of patches for example, Quake 3 went up to 1.32, D…
And yet none of those updates that I can think of had such ridiculous regressions like you see in todays "ship daily" software.