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?

Wait, that was my question...

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.