<story><title>Contributing to the Mozilla code base</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Introduction</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>Several years ago I did want to fix something in Firefox, and it was far easier to just patch a few bytes in the binary (I think it might&amp;#x27;ve been a string constant) than go through the whole build process with all the resources that takes, including trying to find where in the original source to actually make the change, and then still have a totally different binary than the one you wanted to fix, with other (bug-causing) changes you &lt;i&gt;didn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; want due to the different environment you built it in.&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you try to fix&amp;#x2F;revert something that was purposely broken or removed for some Mozilla reason, it is not going to accept your changes either.&lt;p&gt;One of the ideals of open-source was to make it easy to modify and share software. For a lot of the larger projects, I feel like that has missed the mark. I write (mostly small and always portable) software, yet the &amp;quot;build bloat&amp;quot; is a huge turn-off. On the other hand, I&amp;#x27;ve had good experience with the smaller open-source projects, those that need a minimal amount of tooling and resources to build. Some examples I can think of include libpng, zlib, and even OpenSSL.</text></comment>
<story><title>Contributing to the Mozilla code base</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Introduction</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bovine3dom</author><text>Some shameless begging: if anyone picked up &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;tridactyl&amp;#x2F;keyboard-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;tridactyl&amp;#x2F;keyboard-api&lt;/a&gt;, it would make Vimperator-style WebExtensions much better as we&amp;#x27;d be able to respond to user input everywhere in Firefox. We haven&amp;#x27;t been able to find the time to work on it. I&amp;#x27;d be delighted to help anyone who was interested get started.</text></comment>