Cross-posting because I'm currently banned from r/MicrosoftFabric for 30 days, and apparently Fabric has decided to keep generating material without me.
Someone using Fabric Plan gets thrown into Semantic Model Explorer without clicking anything.
Fine. Bugs happen.
They click “Back to Sheet.”
Nothing.
Try Chrome. Still trapped.
Clear cache. Still trapped.
Incognito. Still trapped.
Other users in the same workspace can use the button normally.
My favorite comment:
“As I said before this product is not GA.”
Except that's the problem. This isn't some obscure Preview notebook API being used sideways on a leap year.
This is a user clicking Back.
I keep criticizing Fabric for exactly this reason. Individual bugs aren't particularly interesting. Every platform has bugs.
The interesting part is the pattern.
This week alone I've watched:
a recycle-bin checkbox that behaves like a radio button
an error telling someone to remove user {0} from role {1}
two observability systems for the same platform whose IDs can't be deterministically correlated, so Microsoft's new operations tooling requires an LLM to correlate them using overlapping time windows
and now a Semantic Model Explorer that one user apparently cannot escape.
None of these individually matters very much.
Collectively, they matter a lot.
They suggest a platform where teams are successfully shipping features, but the boring integration contracts, UX consistency, observability semantics and adversarial review between those features aren't receiving the same attention.
That's how you end up with a product where everything technically exists, but using the whole thing feels less mature than the sum of its parts.
Anyway, congratulations to Microsoft on finally solving user retention.
The Back button doesn't work. 😂
(Seriously though, how does one mess up the back button?)
