Web browsers seem to be the refutation of the "if you don't like it, fork it" sentiment of OSS. If it were nearly any other project people wouldn't be strongly

Web browsers seem to be the refutation of the "if you don't like it, fork it" sentiment of OSS. If it were nearly any other project people wouldn't be strongly reiterating that using such a fork is irresponsible and dangerous. It mostly seems to be because nobody believes it's even possible for Pale Moon to keep up with the rapidly changing web standards, because not enough people care about it. All the development power is concentrated on the bleeding edge, things are moving rapidly, and this isn't solvable by asking for volunteers. Sure, all of the important code is in the open for anyone to contribute to, but it doesn't matter what your vision of the perfect open source web browser is if you can't get enough people to help work on it. Unlike 99% of other OSS projects, browsers are just too conplex, and their features are added by large committees who decide what's most important to add. Even though the major browsers are open source, the significant developments in the web platform and the code changes necessary for them are practically impossible to implement by an average developer. They're decided on outside the general OSS community. You simply have to have a large team to be able to keep up. It feels way different than just contributing to less significant projects on GitHub with fewer maintainers. OSS doesn't imply the people maintaining things mostly move forward with things between themselves and have goals set by larger organizations outside the general community, but with browsers it can happen. I don't think there's any real solution to this. The alternative was to deliberately limit the browser featureset while it was still small, but now all those features will never go away. And many of them provide enough benefit to both developers and users. It's not at all that adding them was a net negative if it really meant only corporations can implement them successfully. The complexity is probably an unintentional and unavoidable byproduct due to the sheer number of features. I'm starting to view browsers as complicated operating systems in themselves, like the Linux kernel, which has its own significant developer culture and massive codebase. How much can you simplify such a thing while providing all the features people want? It's a tough question.