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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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some context and/or link would help for everyone who just learned about this project and knows nothing about the devs
I'll just copy a comment I made a while back. It was about the usage of "he" instead of gender neutral pronouns in the documentation:
So I looked further into this, and while I found awesomekling's comment to be a cause of concern, I'm hoping it's a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.
That comment is from 3 years ago, and since then there was a commit merged, that had the sole purpose of fixing these pronouns.
Jag pratar inte Svenska but I know enough that it has gendered pronouns just like English. Actually, it's better than English in that it preserved the neuter singular pronoun (which used to be "thou" in English) so there's even less excuse in terms of linguistic background.
this is incorrect. we recently added a neuter singular pronoun. "hen" was introduced in 2009, and not widely used until like 2019. Also, in technical documentation, masculine pronouns were taught as the default to use (both in swedish and in english) when i was in university in the early 10s. this has changed now, but it definitely wasn't on the table when kling was in school.
Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.
Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is "political".
yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don't translate well. it's like how the word "man" in english used to mean "human" and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the -- now gendered -- word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.
i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.
Not really. Mandarin for example has different characters for "he" and "she", but they are homophones ("ta", or "tamen" plural) so you can't tell who's who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn't use gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn't either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn't it "hen" too?)
i'm not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn't use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague by referring to them as "my colleague") because that's the "cultural default" here still. it has changed a lot in the past five-ten years but it's still the default.
and i actually don't know where we got "hen" from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome "han/hon" in legal texts, and not meant to be used to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.
looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! their word is "hän", which would be pronounced about the same. i learned something.
There was a pull request to change "he" to "they" somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave "their politics" out of it. I wouldn't say it's transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn't look good.
i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
This is very valuable context.
For citations, the only references I see to "pronouns" in their github project is in a section called "Human language policy" in
CONTRIBUTING.md(link). Here's the relevant part:That sounds pretty cash-money to me.
There's one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use "we" when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in "we recommend" vs "it is recommended"). Minutia.
I'm not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)
Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the "political" reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don't like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he's a bit like Brendan Eich. I'll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
I honestly don't understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that's terrible, but I've also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would've been a better CEO at Mozilla because he's interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn't that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we've had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn't have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it's called professionalism. I dislike Eich's views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn't even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!