I've spent the last 3 days angrily submitting bug ticket after bug ticket, including one for Firefox. I just got a new laptop, and the amount of things that get shipped totally broken is just crazy.

Windows 11 almost but not entirely broke HDR. It kinda-sorta works for some things, sometimes, but most apps that used to work with HDR back in Windows 10 just can't any more and are forced to use SDR with sRGB gamut only.[1]

The Win UI SDK regressed from WPF and lost all wide-gamut or HDR support at the API level (which probably explains the above). As in, Microsoft literally removed a wide swath of floating-point color support along with the wide-gamut scRGB color space. We're back to 8-bit RGB arrays in sRGB only as the only option. Like in the 1990s.

Windows Server 2022 can't activate its license unless it uses the UTC time zone. Why? Because Microsoft employees test using Azure VMs, which... use UTC by default.

Speaking of color: Firefox for a while just... stopped doing color management. Then it worked again after a few weeks when it updated.

But it might not be Firefox's fault, because Windows also seems to randomly turn color management off, or force it back to sRGB silently.

If you have a laptop with one of those hybrid Intel+NVIDIA GPU combinations, then HDR games don't work at all with the built-in display, they all report HDR support as N/A. But they will work with external displays!

Speaking of HTTP/3 in Firefox: I've had it permanently disabled because the early releases would leak about 10 GB of memory per minute and lock up the browser very quickly. But not quickly enough to prevent the automated test suites from passing.

... and so on...

The point I'm trying to get to is that in 2022 we've achieved this state of affairs where human beings don't do actual Quality Assurance any more as a job. It's all automated and those people have been summarily fired.

Any issue that is invisible to a DevOps pipeline is Not A Bug and will ship broken. If it ships in a working state, that's probably just a lucky accident, and a subsequent patch will break it for sure.

All of the issues above are caused by automated test suites one way or another. Automated tests are literally blind to output color rendering; testing that requires a physical monitor. Automated tests are almost never set up for long-term testing for things like memory leaks, because they have to run fast. Automated tests use default, vanilla settings for the host OS. Automated tests don't have funky hardware combinations. Automated tests don't measure "jank", or inconsistent performance issues, Etc, etc...

What you're experiencing is the end result of all of this. NOBODY is sitting down and validating the end-result from the perspective of a human user sitting in front of an actual device. That final quality assurance is just not there any more, and hence we're all embarrassed when we have to "show off" some piece of IT tech and find that it's just a broken mess.

/rant

[1] This bug has apparently been fixed in some beta, and might ship around the middle of this year. In other words, Microsoft is perfectly content to break display output on their consumer desktop operating system for six months and just leave it at that.