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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 2 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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{3}[source]▶
Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.
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summerlight ◴[15 Jan 20 22:55 UTC] No.22059737{4}[source]▶
And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla?

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"?

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saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 00:06 UTC] No.22060299{5}[source]▶
> WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple

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.

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1. summerlight ◴[16 Jan 20 00:50 UTC] No.22060598{6}[source]▶
> WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it.

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.

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2. saagarjha ◴[16 Jan 20 01:57 UTC] No.22060981[source]▶
The number above is probably pretty close, but there's a misconception that WebKit is only a tiny fraction of Safari: it's not. Most of the manpower and work goes into it; Safari is just chrome around it (albeit chrome that does take a reasonable amount of work to make…just not as much as it does to support JavaScript and WebAssembly VMs, page styling, rendering, WebGL and WebGPU, networking, tracking prevention, and maintaining support for the the ever-growing list of web standards WebKit supports and participating in discussions on shaping them). Safari is just one of the clients of WebKit.