←back to thread

Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 1 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
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?
replies(8): >>22058549 #>>22058571 #>>22058616 #>>22058776 #>>22058914 #>>22059089 #>>22059615 #>>22059626 #
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.
replies(3): >>22058719 #>>22058790 #>>22058856 #
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?
replies(2): >>22058910 #>>22059166 #
bzbarsky ◴[15 Jan 20 21:32 UTC] No.22058910[source]▶
How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

How big do you think the Chromium team is?

replies(3): >>22059021 #>>22059100 #>>22059397 #
coldtea ◴[15 Jan 20 21:47 UTC] No.22059100[source]▶
>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).

replies(2): >>22059165 #>>22059222 #
Yoric ◴[15 Jan 20 21:53 UTC] No.22059165[source]▶
> 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.

replies(2): >>22059379 #>>22062650 #
1. coldtea ◴[16 Jan 20 08:31 UTC] No.22062650[source]▶
>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 so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.

And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.

Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...