I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?
> How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends
Well, I mean, they started off as a HTTP server company with a not lightweight browser, won an antitrust case but lost the war, and reformed as a non profit. Or, well, a for profit company wholly owned by a non profit. At which point they went about rebuilding Netscape suite, the one with mail clients and calendars (and IRC and nntp), as open source software. Then some rogue employees and interns thought 'nobody wants this shit' (https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...) and firefox was born. Well, phoenix, because engineers never do trademark searches when naming projects. So yea, I don't think anyone fully understands Mozilla, except maybe a few annoyed IRS auditors.
I don't know when Mozilla started taking money for search engine placement, but whoever invented the idea should get a few mil, because now that nobody buys HTTP servers, it's all Netscape/Mozilla has left.
From Google's perspective, it's quite easy to see why they fund chrome: each user that converts to chrome is money they dont have to pay Mozilla. Somehow, despite that depressing metric of user share, mozilla's been making more money every time search bar placement contracts are up for renewal. Some of that was likely competition in search engine space, with both Bing and Yahoo under Marissa chomping for some revenue. I guess the layoffs signal that isn't going to happen again?
Or maybe it signals that you don't need users if your main value anymore is to prove to the DOJ there is no monopoly?
Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?
From Twitter I was sad to be reminded of Netscape 4, a late and bloated mess that shipped first on Windows. Not Netscape 2 or 3, which were baseline here.
It also launched javascript, but I think we can agree that isn't bloat.
But you're right, I totally forgot about the time in which Navigator was sold, rather than given away[2]. Please forgive me, this was a time before the PC in my childhood home had TCP internet, so I was more reliant on libraries and school labs at the time.
Assuming that Chrome team have thousands of engineers, designers and PMs (which is a pretty reasonable number as a modern browser is comparable to OS), I expect them to spend more than a billion each year. Mozilla is really in short of resources.
Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers.
Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood.
It's like the difference between making a Linux distro and maintaining a full OS.
My reasoning is that Google's investment is massive and just because they're throwing money and people at a problem doesn't make it necessary for everyone else to do so as well.
Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers." WebGL stack? WebRTC? Layout engine/compositor? Notifications? You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
WebKit is a bad example, considering the KHTML history alone. These things don't just take devpower, but time - consider, for example, this: http://www.ekioh.com/flow
From what I understand, that team is relatively small in comparison, but actually does have this widely-ish deployed. So it theoretically could be done with less... but it's still insane to even consider. This isn't simple, and anyone who's trying to imply otherwise is wrong.
The other commentator you're responding with also never discloses they worked with Apple previously, while pretty much endlessly pumping up their work here. shrug
I was aware of Ekioh, but only tangentially; I had no idea of their progress so I didn't bring it up. I'd say it's great that they've managed to come this far. And to clarify if it wasn't plain from my other comments, I think that Chrome is the exception rather than the rule: it's an absolutely massive team. Possibly the largest of all the browser vendors that can make something close to compatible with the modern web. When pressed for an example I mentioned WebKit because just happened to be the by far the best example: it's the one that I could point to as competing with Gecko or Blink, plus it had a nice webpage I could link to instead of making people comb through Git commits.
> You're kidding me, there is no small team in the world that could ship a browser stack end to end.
https://webkit.org/team/, ⌘F "Apple". Balance the people on that list who have left or are assigned to work on something else with those who aren't listed there.
And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla?
FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?
Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern browser. This applies to Chrome, Firefox and even old good IE. I don't expect any valid reasons why the same logic cannot apply to Safari.
The number above is probably pretty close, but there's a misconception that WebKit is only a tiny fraction of Safari: it's not. Most of the manpower and work goes into it; Safari is just chrome around it (albeit chrome that does take a reasonable amount of work to make…just not as much as it does to support JavaScript and WebAssembly VMs, page styling, rendering, WebGL and WebGPU, networking, tracking prevention, and maintaining support for the the ever-growing list of web standards WebKit supports and participating in discussions on shaping them). Safari is just one of the clients of WebKit.
Google employs thousands of engineers who spend a majority of their time thinking about Google Chrome. This gets slightly more complicated because of, e.g., the strategic impact of Chrome in other places like ChromeOS. The right comparison would be Apple's WebKit and Safari teams.
to get one year's worth of commits as of today (as of rev c43e247d6444 to be exact), I get 1250. If I repeat that with "google.com" instead of "chromium.org", I get 623. So figure ~1800-1900 there.
I get 15. If I repeat that with apple.com instead of webkit.org I get 70. If I just list all distinct authors, I get 128. Note that this is an underestimate of what it takes to build a browser, because a bunch of the parts of an actual browser are not in the webkit repo itself last I checked. Like the whole network stack.
I get 359. I am quite sure this last is is an underestimate: I am a Mozilla employee, but I use a non-mozilla.com address in my commits, because I started contributing before becoming an employee. I'm not the only one. The total number of distinct committers there is 1497 which is a serious overestimate: web platform test changesets come with their original author, who is often an engineer working on some other browser. If I filter out webkit.org, microsoft.com, google.com, chromium.org, webkit.org, that leaves me with 1265. This is almost certainly a significant over-estimate, since it's more than the total number of Mozilla employees.
Note that we may be undercounting QA here, since not all of them might commit to the main repository.
On the other hand, we might be counting one-off contributors who are not really on the "browser team" per se, especially for "apple.com" and "google.com". We're also overcounting somewhat depending on how much churn there was over the course of the year (people leaving, new ones joining).
But pallpark, I suspect an unrealistic lower bound is 100 and a reasonable lower bound is 150-500, depending on how much of the tech stack you want to delegate to other entities. The Chrome team is a lot bigger than any of those numbers, of course.
With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not nearly a browser :(
> Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recollection Chromium embedding teams inside Google that are 30+ developers (again, let's forget managers, UX researchers, etc.). I know that there are at least 4 such teams at Google.
I would be very surprised if Google didn't have at least 1000 developers working on Chromium.
>With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.
And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.
Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...
> With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.
WebKit runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS across Intel and ARM architectures.
WebKit provides the web views for countless 3rd party apps, including Mail, Calendar, iTunes, etc.
Apple certainly has fewer people who get paid to write code for Safari/WebKit than Google has on Chrome/Blink. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla has more people too, especially since they’re rewriting pieces of the browser engine at the same time.
This list has 400 pages of contributors (~8000 people). Even with a very conservative assumption in that only 10% of them are full time developers, it's still 800. This doesn't even include other derivative projects and non engineers.
One metric of power that has been constant throughout human history is the number of people you are in charge of. You'll find this to be the most common measure of power across all of industries, militaries, cultures and governments.
Bloated headcount destroys most software. People still think you can throw more people at it and it will get built faster and better, as if we were building the pyramids.
Rust is perhaps the best thing to come out of any corporation in years. Protobuf, Envoy, Kubernetes, ... -- I struggle to think of anything better for our industry than Rust.
You could feel that Rust as a programming language is the greatest thing to ever happen to computer science, the big question for a corporation’s C-suite is can it make money. I’d assume (perfect possible that I’m wrong) that Rust does nothing but cost money for Mozilla. This is not to say I think it will be cancelled or force to expatriate and become a separate legal entity, but management is beholden to shareholders, not the tech community at large.
And yes I know that Rust does receive some corporate funding from other entities, but it is still a Mozilla product.
> Mozilla has from the get-go attempted to create an independent governance structure and to solicit involvement from other companies, because we know this makes Rust a better language for everyone.
It seems like they have a lot of influence over the language, and other things. Like, whether there's independent governance or not. I'm happy they're looking for collaborators, but lets not pretend that founder status comes with zero influence.
That is really a separate issue, if I’m recalling correctly, there is a team of Rust devs who specifically are employees by Mozilla Corporation. Also, even with an attempt at ‘team’ independence, Mozilla still owns the Rust trademark and the payables for Rust, things like servers for crates.io, etc are also paid by Mozilla Corp. My point was if an executive with only revenue concerns looks at Rust and sees a team which is not just helping Mozilla, but who attempt to help the industry as a whole, including competitors, it is conceivable that cutting those expenses is an option to pursue. I do not think this is particularly likely (I would assume the expenditure on Rust is minimal compared to the salary and benefits of 70 employees), I was just exploring the rabbit hole the GP comment sent me down.
I'd go the opposite and say that Rust is a competitive edge for Firefox to beat other browsers, architecturally. There were things they tried and failed many times to do to improve Firefox's performance and it wasn't until Rust that they were achievable.
I'm a Rust fanboy, let's state that at the beginning. It does, however, have a slow production adoption even though there is a fairly quick developer adoption (much to my chagrin). I think it would do better to become it's own entity in light of this news, and the fact that it doesn't really get managed by Mozilla anymore anyway.
