Comment by constantcrying
3 years ago
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in.
>As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time.
You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want.
> You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
Based on what logic? It's 20+ million lines of code touching half if the "hard" problems of computer programming - graphics, fonts, encodings, localization, JIT engines, hardware acceleration, support for multiple architectures (including aforementioned JIT), support for multiple operating systems, massive parallelism, sandboxing, WASM support, hardware support abstractions like WebUSB and WebMIDI, etc, and a massive swamp of compatiblity hacks, and literally books worth of new standards they have to implement every year.
Much of which has to be as high performance as possible while simultaneously not being ludicrously insecure, because the threat environment is basically as hostile as it gets.
The fastest way to "become a lean organization" would be to just give up and become yet another Chromium clone. Barring that, they have a lot of software to maintain if they want a truly independent browser. A modern browser is comparable in effort to supporting an entire operating system, because that's what browsers kind of are nowadays.
About the only other option is to lay off all their staff in SF and Paris and other HCoL areas and relocate to Central and Eastern Europe.
For 200M you can get around 1.5k full time developers, not including community contributions. That is quite a lot and they easily could add hundreds of more developers if they wanted to.
The specific number they pay is also not that relevant, what I am concerned about is their position. They have one "customer" that enables their entire operation. That is bad for any organization, if that is also your main competition you are in an even worse spot. The longterm sustainability of Mozilla depends on being able to operate independently from Google funding.
Their revenue is 800 million. It sounds like a lot of money for a browser Over the last 10 years their revenue would?? say 5 billion. That is a lot
What the hell is this? Has HackerNews now turned into a site where ACTUALLY GENERATING GREAT REVENUE WITH YOUR PRODUCT IS FROWNED UPON!?
I don't understand this comment at all. Is making money a bad thing now? I thought that was the whole point of being a hacker and starting a bsiness and then getting funding and doing hard work and then boooom .. revenue, money, profit! Success!
No? Not anymore? Or is Mozilla special and are they not allowed?
(Sarcasm - please do not respond)
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