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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 5 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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[source]▶
Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.
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simias ◴[15 Jan 20 22:23 UTC] No.22059463[source]▶
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.

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saagarjha ◴[15 Jan 20 22:26 UTC] No.22059489{3}[source]▶
I am responding specifically to the claim that Mozilla is short on resources because Google has a thousand people working on Chrome.
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1. summerlight ◴[15 Jan 20 22:57 UTC] No.22059755{4}[source]▶
Google and Mozilla are competing in the browser market so it's pretty reasonable to compare their investments. I don't understand your reasoning here.
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2. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 00:00 UTC] No.22060263[source]▶
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.
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3. jopsen ◴[16 Jan 20 06:32 UTC] No.22062155[source]▶
True, but when you say:

>Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers

It implies that you have any examples.

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4. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 06:48 UTC] No.22062193{3}[source]▶
Safari.
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5. jopsen ◴[17 Jan 20 23:08 UTC] No.22080591{4}[source]▶
Fair point :)