For Session Restore, there were two problems. One of them was that it had gained lots of features and the architecture wasn't adapted anymore. That's the kind of things that happens with all long-lived projects.
The other one is that getting file safety correctly is really hard. The OS likes to the developer, the filesystem lies to the OS and the hardware lies to everyone. For most applications, that's not a big deal, but for something that used to run every 15 seconds on hundreds of millions of computers, this can cause data loss. That's why you really want to use a DBMS rather than roll your own format if data safety is critical.
For shutdown, it was also a case of initial architecture not matching the current situation anymore. Firefox was initially a synchronous, single-threaded, single-process architecture, but this had stopped being the case for a few years already. At some point, shutdown needed to be re-architectured, I happened to be the one who managed to convince people that the time was now :)
In my time writing databases, I found that not only the mount-flags could result in data-loss despite fsync, given you use fsync as it is supposed to be used [0], but even enterprise-grade hardware would at times (at that scale [1]) drop and/or corrupt a few bits here and there.
That reminds me of the case where AWS famously revealed that a single NIC in their ginaromous S3 fleet flipped a single bit once in a while and that caused an outage because their gossip-daemon responsible for fleet health-checks failed spectacularly [2].
Bryan Cantrill's talk on the realted topic of hardware/firmware bugs is pretty good [3].
I click the "Use Apple" button and it takes me back at the same page with "you need a valid email account".
This is on the ro.wordpress.com. Maybe it matters.
The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.
People generally use their real name on sites like Quora, Yelp, Amazon, etc. and they seem to work fine. You can also choose to use a fake name pretty easily on these sites - or on Google.
I would adjust this. No company will buy products just because they are a bit better. You have to completely knock that out of the park to be compelling.
OTOH, I'll grant if you really fail on support etc. you will probably fizzle out anyway.
Options? Fixed-rate mortgages? Salaries that are stated as a number of dollars, not a percentage of company profit? "We will charge you perhaps a bit more / pay you perhaps a bit less but in exchange we will take the risk of the real value fluctuating and your number is guaranteed" is a super common deal.
More fundamentally, why should they do it? Because they think it'll get customers, and as a big company they can absorb the risk.
Every single company that ships things to customers. If it gets damaged in transit it is their problem not your problem. If traffic is bad it is the shipping companies problem.
Every single company that offers a warranty. If something unexpected caused an issue in creating the good (in this case a ride from a to b) it is their problem not your problem.
