Comment by lesuorac
5 days ago
At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?
Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).
Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.
I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.
Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).
> so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour
I don't think that's correct. IIUC, Software Dev was 260M for Mozilla + Mozilla Corporation + Mozilla Foundation + MZLA Technologies Corp. + Mozilla Ventures + Mozilla.ai. With large increase of 40M from 2023 to 2022 so I'd bet a good chunk of that is going to Mozilla.ai knowing how the rest of the corporate world is acting right now.
Like the Chrome Mobile team is 40 people [1]. I can't image that web + support is going to more than 4x that so you get to ~160 people which at 300k a head is 48 million. I don't see how out of the 6 organizations that 93% (700/750) of the employees are working on FireFox and not a different thing.
48 million just in salaries against the $494 million that Google gave Mozilla in 2023 just seems like it should be extremely possible to save at least half of it. Sure, we've gone beyond the initial ~$150M but for all (?) of Mozilla's life the payments from Google have covered software development [3] and for Safari the payments were in the billions so if Mozilla focused on making a better browser with higher market share their payments would go up as well.
[1]: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success...
[2]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
So one of several teams working on Chrome Mobile (so not the rendering engine, JavaScript engine, etc...) was 40+ people. That tells us nothing about the size of the overall Chrome team.
I have seen comments on HackerNews that estimated 1000-4000 people working on Chrome at Google, but without a sound basis. Chromium had ~800 individuals author a commit, that's probably as close as we can get to actual hard facts.
The Platform Division which includes Chrome was 20.000+ but it's pure guesswork to break out numbers for Chrome for that.
Honestly my prior is that the vast majority of software dev work at Moz goes towards Firefox, I don't see any evidence to the contrary, including in terms of products released/developed. A modern browser is an enormously complex engineering feat, nothing else Moz releases is in that ballpark.
I guess bottom line is that we don't really know the exact breakdown.