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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 7 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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summerlight ◴[15 Jan 20 21:54 UTC] No.22059166[source]▶
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.
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saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 22:13 UTC] No.22059356{3}[source]▶
Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.
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1. dblohm7 ◴[15 Jan 20 22:21 UTC] No.22059436{4}[source]▶
Do they ship their own rendering engines?
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2. saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 22:23 UTC] No.22059470[source]▶
Yes.
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3. banachtarski ◴[15 Jan 20 22:59 UTC] No.22059769[source]▶
Honestly calling BS.

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.

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4. saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 23:59 UTC] No.22060257{3}[source]▶
> Just writing a javascript runtime alone isn't just a "handful of engineers."

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.

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5. The_rationalist ◴[16 Jan 20 01:04 UTC] No.22060675{4}[source]▶
But webkit is abandonware that is rotting.
6. Klonoar ◴[16 Jan 20 02:15 UTC] No.22061086{3}[source]▶
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

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

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7. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 08:40 UTC] No.22062698{4}[source]▶
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.