the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

This article appears to be pretty even-handed.

My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.

let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000

That feels like a dangerous argument;

• 2000 = NT 5.0
• XP = NT 5.1
• XP x64 = NT 5.2
• Vista = NT 6.0
• 7 = NT 6.1
• 8 = NT 6.2
• 8.1 = NT 6.3
• 10 = NT 6.4
  (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)

Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.

mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.

let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000

That feels like a dangerous argument;

• 2000 = NT 5.0
• XP = NT 5.1
• XP x64 = NT 5.2
• Vista = NT 6.0
• 7 = NT 6.1
• 8 = NT 6.2
• 8.1 = NT 6.3
• 10 = NT 6.4
  (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)

Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.

Did you read the thing?

let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000

That feels like a dangerous argument;

• 2000 = NT 5.0
• XP = NT 5.1
• XP x64 = NT 5.2
• Vista = NT 6.0
• 7 = NT 6.1
• 8 = NT 6.2
• 8.1 = NT 6.3
• 10 = NT 6.4
  (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)

Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.

For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.

I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.

Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.

In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.