Mozilla lays off 70

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?

Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.

They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?

How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

How big do you think the Chromium team is?

>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).

> 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.

> 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.

Safari runs on 1.5 operating systems and a limited set of hardware.