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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 15 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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jahlove ◴[15 Jan 20 20:56 UTC] No.22058463[source]▶
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?
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ameshkov ◴[15 Jan 20 21:06 UTC] No.22058571[source]▶
Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.
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jahlove ◴[15 Jan 20 21:28 UTC] No.22058856[source]▶
They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?
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1. bzbarsky ◴[15 Jan 20 21:32 UTC] No.22058910[source]▶
How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

How big do you think the Chromium team is?

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2. jahlove ◴[15 Jan 20 21:41 UTC] No.22059021[source]▶
> How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

Wait, that was my question...

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3. coldtea ◴[15 Jan 20 21:47 UTC] No.22059100[source]▶
>How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

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).

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4. Yoric ◴[15 Jan 20 21:53 UTC] No.22059165[source]▶
> I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.

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.

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5. summerlight ◴[15 Jan 20 21:59 UTC] No.22059222[source]▶
https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/contributors

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.

6. saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 22:16 UTC] No.22059379{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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7. bzbarsky ◴[15 Jan 20 22:17 UTC] No.22059393[source]▶
OK, let's do some data-gathering. If I git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git and then run:

  git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep chromium.org | sort -u | wc -l
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.

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
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.

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
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.

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8. shuckles ◴[15 Jan 20 22:17 UTC] No.22059397[source]▶
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.
9. marcinzm ◴[15 Jan 20 23:06 UTC] No.22059820{4}[source]▶
Safari runs on 1.5 operating systems and a limited set of hardware.
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10. saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 23:50 UTC] No.22060182{5}[source]▶
WebKit runs on a lot more.
11. alwillis ◴[16 Jan 20 00:25 UTC] No.22060423{5}[source]▶
Apple is known for how small their teams are.

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.

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12. junar ◴[16 Jan 20 01:50 UTC] No.22060937{3}[source]▶
Note that getting a chromium.org email does not require being a Google employee.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/become-a-committer

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13. bzbarsky ◴[16 Jan 20 06:12 UTC] No.22062086{4}[source]▶
That is true, and I did not claim that the entirety of the "Chromium team" are Google employees, either...

You do need to be a bit more involved than a few drive-by contributions to get a chromium.org email, as far as I can tell.

14. coldtea ◴[16 Jan 20 08:31 UTC] No.22062650{3}[source]▶
>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...

15. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 08:43 UTC] No.22062714{6}[source]▶
A number of other companies also contribute support for a variety of other platforms too. Scrolling through a platform header gives a good idea of who's adapted WebKit for their needs: https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/blob/master/Source/WTF/wtf/...