@agowa338 sorry but this is basically saying "the source code is complicated so it might as well be closed soruce", which I disagree with.

while I, too, like readable and well-documented code, I consider it a less problematic than having to decompile and reverse engineer a binary if I want to understand a program.

Browsers are big complicated projects, easily as complicated as an OS kernel, that goes for all of them. For firefox there are some tools you can try to help like searchfox.org

@anthropy
I'm not referring to the source code itself. But to how it is published and presented.

Like if you're not already familiar with Firefox or Thunderbird development just try to find it for example. And once you managed to do that, try to figure out how to compile it without having changed anything (yet)...

Also this is the first time I even hear searchfox.org exists.

@agowa338
My first search result for "firefox source code" is https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox.
The third link in the main README points to https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html, which explains how to compile firefox from source.

Doesn't look that complicated even without any prior knowledge.

@nspace Well that GitHub is not where you contribute and mostly just a mirror....

And now try to actually check it out and heaven forbid figure out how to compile and maybe even patch some minor thing.

However I acknowledge that it appears to be a bit more accessible and less gate-keeperish than Thunderbird...