Not in a mood to engage with reply guys today, so I'll say this here: when I talk about large software being a morbid antipattern, I'm including browsers. I'm including Firefox. In fact this was, in hindsight, one of the big foundational mistakes of letting Google Chrome pioneer a bunch of web standards.
Obviously to some extent the cat is out of the bag now. The world relies on the fact that we built a somewhat portable inner platform that can run on every mainstream operating system and most of the small fries. It's just that within the framework of my own politics, this is pretty clearly the digital equivalent of an ecological disaster that will take several generations to repair.
This is why I am not a sympathetic audience for "well you have to accept opt-out tracking in browsers, because they're big complex machines that require giant paid teams to maintain."
1. I don't.
2. Funding anxiety is a proprietism caused by scale.
3. That scale was always a mistake, we got EEE'd.
If I wanted to be treated this way by my software, or even if I was tolerant of being treated this way by my software, I wouldn't have submerged myself into open source, holding only a middle finger above the surface.
Mozilla isn't enshittifying Firefox because it's evil (even if it is a little evil these days) or because they're incompetent (they are, but that's a side issue). The fundamental issue is that building a browser for the full suite of HTML5 support is a bad quest, and if you take it, you will find yourself having to act more and more like Microsoft or Meta to survive.
Ideas are technologies. So as an anarchist FOSS technologist, let me give you a technology for $free.99, as they say - a technology that will forever change the way you parse conference talks, AWS product descriptions, and cloudtech whitepapers.
"Scale is where software development ethics go to die."
The one thing to be careful of, is this will give you the wrong kind of negative impression of a lot of speakers. It's half-useful to hear scale described as an unexamined good and think that a speaker is crowing about building the torment nexus, because that does accurately reflect the long-term goals of the speaker's employers. But you have to understand that most of these people don't have the class-consciousness to hear the problem in their words, and that's actually much scarier.
