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Comment by matheist | Hacker News Reader

> intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox

This part is difficult if you actually want those changes to be accepted.

I recently had a patch accepted into Firefox. More than three months from submission to merge, including one round of code review which I turned around the same day. It was not a large patch. This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

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> This is no criticism of the Firefox team, just the reality that my priorities are not their priorities.

I am a former Mozilla Corporation employee, so I am more willing to criticize the current state of MoCo culture as a whole...

> They don't necessarily have the bandwidth or interest in accepting other people's/teams' vision or contribution.

I would say it really depends on the nature of the patches being contributed; if they are not inconsistent with project goals and not excessively burdensome, I'd hope that they in theory would be considered.

However, I will say that MoCo culture was already much different by the late 2010s than it was in the early 2010s. When I joined MoCo in 2012, there were multiple managers I interacted with who openly valued community interaction and encouraged their reports to set quarterly goals relating to mentoring external contributors. IMHO that encouragement had died off by the late 2010s.

When you left, do you have a sense for how many developers were actually working on Firefox full-time? I'm curious because people always say that Firefox would be impossible to fund, pointing to Mozilla's expenses, but I've never seen someone actually put forward the math for what portion of those expenses are actually Firefox.

Oh geez, it's been long enough that I don't really remember the specifics. In the hundreds, for sure.

This is really telling of the current vibe I get from Firefox, and why I feel resistant to support them beyond “It’s a bit more private than default Chrome”

Companies gonna company and expand in the wrong direction if they forget were they come frome.

had a positive experience recently on an issue and getting it fixed, people were helpful and instructive. For drive-by newbies there's an initial penalty to dig into Mozilla tooling. Lowering the threshold there will attract more contributors.

That doesn’t seem unreasonable for a drive by PR to an enormous project. I contributed go an open source rust project a few years back and my first PR took weeks of back and forth. My second and following ones were merged in days.

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