Yeah so unless you know how to fork the project and remove/add + compile whatever you want, you don't really have a right to complain. But I guess if you do know how to do that, you also have no right to complain.

People can complain all they want, I wasn't saying one doesn't have any right to complain, people are free to have their opinions and I was speaking my mind like everyone complaining is, I apologize for that, maybe I should have joined in on the fun in the echo chamber, probably would get more internet points for that.

The probability of complaining, that actually solves any given problem in that moment, hovers around zero. Especially after all the BS people have been saying they have been seeing with Mozilla for some time now (enough time over the years to see hundreds of c/c++ code samples, walkthroughs, and to read their build instructions[0]) … its quite banal at this point. Too many people have worked too hard to share their knowledge on the internet for me to be satisfied with complaining about something that we all have a capacity to do ourselves to some degree if were commenting on hacker news.

But that's just how I feel, everyone else is free to feel differently.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Building Firefox isn't so easy.

There are like 50 build options, any random combination of which is likely to result in build failure, and your only option is to try a combination, wait 10-40 minutes for it to fail, try to diagnose what went wrong and fix it.

There's also the matter that Linux distro maintainers know more about building than you do, and include things like exploit mitigation, which you'll be missing out on.

And of course you need to monitor Firefox for security updates, and rebuild every time there's an update.

It gets boring pretty quickly. Even GNU barely manages to update their IceCat fork.

Isn't so easy compared to what? Complaining? Sure, but the research I work on is way harder than this for me… as well as a host of ill defined problems that require way more than just being able to write software…

Nothing you mention isn't uncommon for any decent size project. It shouldn't act as a deterrent for expanding ones horizons, and implementing something you want done where there will be no chance in hell it will be added/removed upstream in any decent amount of time for free (10-40 min, but you don't have to compile the whole project while debugging… I made some mods in dom/base/ and netwerk/protocol/http as well as other places, and neither took more than 10-20 seconds to compile standalone while debugging). I tend to think security is mostly security theater anyways for what its worth. So many ways to get owned, and the user is usually the weakest link… and if you are targeted and don't know it, game over…

And if its boring for someone, they obviously don't have enough motivation, but maybe just enough to moan. Then again, the only user I have to support is myself for the things I want in the browser instead of a bunch of people who will probably never push a line of code with their complaints masquerading as requests… yeah, I can see how that can get boring.

Compiling something for yourself has an effect on exactly one person: you. "Complaining" affects other people and often enough actually reaches people who have a more direct line of effect on the product (especially in the foss world).