Risk... companies that make too much revenue from one product or too much from one customer risk death.
And yes I know that Rust does receive some corporate funding from other entities, but it is still a Mozilla product.
I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.
>How big do you think the Chromium team is?
Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
It is heavily used at and funded by Mozilla but they have almost zero influence over the direction of the language.
Actually, this kind of perception is the reason that they have been recently talking about forming a Rust Foundation.
http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/01/09/towa...
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.
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.
Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.
git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep chromium.org | sort -u | wc -l
If I git clone https://github.com/WebKit/webkit.git as of today (rev ba925cdbc8c3f2dff44cdcb92d9a374816b0215b) and run:
git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep webkit.org | sort -u | wc -l
If I hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ (the repository for Firefox) and run:
hg log -d 2019 | grep "^user:" | sort -u | fgrep mozilla.com | wc -l
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.
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.
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?
And yet from your own citation:
> 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.
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"?
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.
But it is. You can verify it yourself: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/commits/master/Source/JavaS...
> 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.
WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it.
> And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase.
Not really.
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.
Well, it's close to 100, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393 ? You can bring up with other numbers to refute this.
> Not really.
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.
I think starting Rust, not Firefox, will be what Mozilla is remembered for in 50 years.
https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/become-a-committer
They've managed to actually get GMail to render - a not insignificant task: https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-ro...
The timeline on this page alone is in years: https://www.ekioh.com/company/#team
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
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...
- ftp uploads - email - nntp
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator_2#Features [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141102052346/http://news.cnet....