Standards Bloat is a thing

As I see it, the job of a HTTP client (browser) is to correctly implement the open standards that define the web, no more and no less.

I’m political enough about open source that I’ll endure a fair amount of inconvenience in order to avoid proprietary (or even commercial) software, but I also disagree on most points with the direction Firefox has been going, especially with UI and extensions. Maybe being political about open source is an empty gesture like fair trade coffee. It certainly seems sometimes like Firefox is an example of openwashing, which is scary, as browsers are basically the key underlying technology of the web, and the HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript standard is getting complex enough that only a multigazillion dollar organization can build a web browser (in particular, a rendering engine) from scratch that correctly implements the standards. I used to laud the idea of industry standards, as I saw them as the correct alternative to proprietary kludges becoming de-facto standards, but since the bodies making the standards are basically industry consortia, or organizations whose members are organizations (mostly of the for-profit type), what standards-making has turned into is a conspiracy of the commercial participants against the noncommercial participants.