That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
$250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.
The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.
I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)
I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
> $250k is a staggering salary... not everyone lives in San Francisco. Or America for that matter.
Still you need to spend at least $250K (which direct compensation would be close to $150K) to hire a competent browser dev. And I'm not speaking about SF... Well you can have better cost efficiency outside American metros, but the reality is that experienced browser devs are rare outside those areas.
> I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc.
Not objecting that disruptions can be done with a small focused team. But here we're talking about dealing with massive complexity, not an emerging market. You cannot "redefine" the problem here, the ecosystem is mess and we've got to live with it for a good time...
> I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
You will be surprised to know how small the core engine parts are to the total code base. You may argue that most of those are not necessary and perhaps half of them are pretty much ad-hoc complexity but the rest have their own reason to exist. And the new browser engine developers typically learn this hard way then decides to fall back to Chromium. I've seen this several times.
Firefox has way more than 20 developers. Looking at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mots/index.html, if I'm not mistaken in my count, there are currently 147 module owners and peers alone. Some of those might be volunteers, but I think the large majority of them are Mozilla staff. On top of that there are probably a number of further Mozilla staff developers who aren't owners or peers, QA staff, product managers, sysadmins and other support staff…
I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many.
Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more!
The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on too.
So, I'd argue that 20 good devs (again, a number I pulled out of the air!) split into, say, 4 smaller teams could achieve a shit load of work under the right circumstances, with the right leadership and so on.
I'm currently a senior architect with over 50 devs below me. Most are mid-level at best (not a slur, just where they are in their career!) but the few good ones are very good. A team of 20 of those could pull it off!
It'd be a tall order building a browser from scratch with 20 devs maybe but it's already built.
There's someone else right now who is going to important organizations they obviously don't understand, making wild claims about 'I could do it for much less', and cutting personnel drastically.
You severely underestimate the engineering cost of modern web browser. Assuming a sufficient value-addition fork, a team of 20 cannot even catch up the Chromium upstream. Good luck coming up with a new engine compatible with Chrome; MS tried it and finally gave up.
>Maybe they will find out you don’t need $555M a year to make a web browser.
The only other browser spends significantly more than that. If it's so much cheaper, you'd expect organizations like Microsoft to have stayed in the game.
>First good step would be to fire that useless CEO.
The one who stepped down a year ago? Or do you have some issue with the interim? They're still looking for a permanent one
And that's precisely the problem people have been talking about for a decade now. If it was just the browser, maybe it wouldn't have lost 90% of its former market share.
They lost a lot of users because websites were getting heavy and Firefox used to be single-threaded when Chrome appeared and was blazingly fast due to its multi-process design.
I still vividly recall the frozen UI as another tab loaded or did work. And if one tab crashed they all went with it. Annoyed me every time.
After many years[1] they sorted it out, but in my view it's clear that's what really killed their momentum, as it was such a sacrifice to stay with Firefox compared to using Chrome.
Firefox lost market share because they kept antagonizing their users. It's easy to read Chrome as the boogeyman to blame for Firefox' failure, but that's... also not correct.
Mozilla is, rather frustrating for those that lead it I'm sure, chosen largely based on principles that people found they couldn't get from Google. Things like "don't profit from me the user", "don't track me" and "don't do things in my browser without me knowing about it". These aren't things people point towards the Chrome browser with because if you expect any of this to not be done by Google, then you're kidding yourself.
Mozilla meanwhile has a pretty wide history of just... doing things that break this promise[0][1][2] (listed is mostly recent stuff, but they have been doing it since forever, going back to the forced Pocket integration).
Chrome users don't care about this stuff (since they already use a Google product), Firefox users by virtue of picking Firefox did. And when it comes to optimization, Chrome does beat Firefox pretty handily, so people started abandoning Firefox because at that point, both Mozilla and Google offer the same value proposition.
Their recent ventures into adtech are probably going to annihilate their biggest potential userbase gain, which is Google tightening the screws on adblockers and uBlock Origin in particular not playing ball with them on it. (UBOL is a joke and the UI by design makes it look like a "kiddie"/unprofessional adblocker.)
Google didn't kill Firefox (they want it alive to avoid antitrust lawsuits). Mozilla did.
Normal users like my parents were completely unaware of all of these shenanigans. They do notice sites and their OS's nagging them to use Chrome/Edge/Safari.
Or we need effective antitrust regulation. Firefox would be in a very different position if Google hadn’t been allowed to make the YouTube experience worse for Firefox users (promises around WebM, proprietary web components) along with the heavy marketing push.
Word of mouth worked fine in Firefox’s favor for a few years.
I switched to Chrome years ago because it ran so much smoother than Firefox, and anecdotally I know of many others who did the same. With the switch, so did the recommendations.
This was before website's and OS's were consistently nagging people to switch to their own browser. And when the everyday browsing experience varied more among different browsers.
And now things are kind of going full circle, because part of the reason why Mozilla/Firefox increased their scope was to create services that would capture marketshare from a specific audience; which seems to be those who care about their privacy, though executive pay isn’t apart of that, and I don’t know if theres a viable defense for that.
Just to provide one example, if Firefox suddenly no longer has bookmark/history/password syncing because Mozilla has refocused on its core products (Firefox/Thunderbird/MDN), suddenly you'll see Firefox's market share dwindle even more, because ordinary users are accustomed to every browser having a bunch of bells and whistles like profile syncing.
The set of features people expect from a modern browser is really big now. To their credit, the Mozilla web standards people actively fought against a lot of the scope creep like "webpages should be able to flash firmware to USB devices" or "webpages should be able to talk to MIDI keyboards" but they lost, and now those are things a web browser is expected to do.
I've seen people argue that Mozilla shouldn't be offering cloud services and should just build a browser that never phones home to any servers at all, whether it's telemetry, automated updates, or profiles. I think all of those are part of shipping a modern browser, personally.
Maintaining all those cloud services raises your company's operational costs a lot, you now need people on-call 24/7 to maintain everything, you need webdevs who can wrangle postgres or redis or whatever, you need security experts to make sure the cloud stack is secure end to end, etc. So I think it's also fair for people to call this cloud stuff out as a cost center for Mozilla.
Which cloud services? I don't see how automated updates nor sync count as "cloud services" (and I'll note that the sync server used to be open source, so you could pull from the community like Mozilla claims to be part of).
A very large portion of the money goes directly into the pockets of senior managers who, based on Mozilla's dismal and falling market share, add absolutely no value to the business.
More than 1% of revenue (not profit; revenue) goes straight into the pocket of the CEO.
