Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

On one hand, centralization at a commercial provider isn't great.

On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.

I wish I could search on GitHub without logging in

They used to have 64 core 32 machine cluster just for search. You may want to reduce unnecessary search. https://github.blog/engineering/the-technology-behind-github...

I wish that too, and I’ve always wanted to offer features like this in everything I build.

But it’s a lot of work to prevent abuse, especially for resource intensive features when supporting unsigned-in use cases.

> Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise

Surely most open source projects have a link to their source code? Whether it's github, gitlab, sourcehut, or anything else?

Many GNU and GNU-adjacent projects will happily list their release tarballs, but make it annoyingly difficult to find the underlying repos that most of them use. Usually the link is squirreled away somewhere in the "contributing" guidelines.

AFAIK https://savannah.gnu.org is the "sourceforge" for GNU projects. I was thrilled when they stood up a GitLab instance but recently locked it down so one can't even browse without being logged in https://emba.gnu.org/explore -> sign in

This from a company that uses Ruby for their webapp and hosts probably one of the bigger CI build farms probably in the world. I have a very hard time crying because they have to run a beefy search cluster. I would guess that a very non-trivial portion of the horsepower for such a thing is about ingest of the constant updates moreso than the actual search part