@noracodes firefox / chrome isn’t why the web is full of bloat though. the web is full of bloat because no amount of free software can let you influence what somebody else's server sends you, or what requirements they put on letting you access their systems. (free software actually just lets somebody else's server send you even MORE code you don't want to run, because they don’t even have to write it themselves.) no amount of licensing can fix this. software projects built entirely around the four freedoms have no answer to this problem, and largely do not even recognize it AS a problem, or pretend that if you are running an open source browser, that somehow gives you power over what is happening on corporations’ servers. it doesn’t.
software CANNOT replace infrastructure and the free software movement has had ZERO interest in providing well-funded, reliable, maintained network infrastructure for everyday people. instead it is obsessed with an egocentric, libertarian model which concerns itself only with individuals and what they can self-host and what rights they have regarding their own machines.
Re Last Boost:
"no amount of free software can let you influence what somebody else's server sends you"
It absolutely can and it is doing it cosntantly, all the time for me, and many people:
* pieHole: block loads of adds and tracker at the DNS level, for every device in the house
* Privacy Badger, Ublock Origin: Stops loads of script from loading up, loads of ads, et.
* Firefox (even, if its about to go): stops 3rd party tracking.
* unhook: stops youtube advert to pop up.
The server is literally not sending me the files, files it hoped I would, but I'm not.
And this is also something that people like me install on many computers of people who do not have the knowledge to install it themselves.
Like one of me does that to dozen of people at least, maybe more.
And I'm saying this on a "web" social network that is so popular that twitter spun a new network for it, and even facebook is scared.
Like the whole web is based on open source, open standards, and even open data plays a big role here (see wikipedia for example).
The problem is not that Open* is no good for the web, the whole tech industry is built from it.
The people that do the Open* now have a day job and it is building the web (the 2.0 version) and you need a full time job to keep up with the technology churn.
Engineers do 8 hours per day, for companies that do shittier and shittier stuff with worsening labour practices, but human got to eat so what else to do.
@noracodes you refocusing this from a conversation about networked infrastructure to a conversation about choice of browser application used to access that infrastructure is exactly the kind of missing the point that FLOSS has been doing for decades