@doctormo @daniel_bohrer @JessTheUnstill Mozilla doesn't have $100m to spend on Firefox dev. They have $100m to spend on executive pay, marketing, making Firefox worse, etc. Only a very small portion actually goes into maintaining Firefox, poorly.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 22:35:00 JST 
Rich Felker
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Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 22:44:35 JST 
Jess👾
@dalias @doctormo @daniel_bohrer The problem with Mozilla is that their customers aren't their users, it's Google
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 22:44:35 JST
Rich Felker
@JessTheUnstill @doctormo @daniel_bohrer I think it's worse than that. Their management & executive class would be just as douchy without Google. They've been chasing "sustainability" without Google for decades with a dotcom era mindset that you fund free things through advertising & scammy partnerships with your bros' startups.
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Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 22:49:27 JST
Jess👾
@dalias @doctormo @daniel_bohrer Right. Rather then following the mindset of many successful FOSS projects of living within their means of donations and sponsorships, they've tried to become a SaaS tech company. In an industry polluted with SaaS tech companies.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:15:03 JST
Rich Felker
@yannsionneau @JessTheUnstill @doctormo @daniel_bohrer They're not making it, they're maintaining what already exists. And despite having an obscene budget they're barely doing that, and doing it poorly, because all of the resources are misallocated chasing things they're deluded into believing will make them "sustainable" (without Google money) rather than "exactly the thing their users were fleeing when they chose Firefox".
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Yann Sionneau (yannsionneau@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:15:05 JST 
Yann Sionneau
@JessTheUnstill @dalias @doctormo @daniel_bohrer On the other hand it costs a LOT of money to make a browser.
They have a lot of engineers and each engineer costs a lot of money.
you can't make a browser with 3 volunteers that contribute during their off-job-time.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:16:57 JST
Rich Felker
@yannsionneau @JessTheUnstill @doctormo @daniel_bohrer The way they could have been sustainable was operating on 5-10% of what Google was paying them and building an endowment with the rest, then saying 🖕 to Google as soon as it was large enough.
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Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:40:26 JST
Jess👾
@dalias @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer
I know it's just a widely accepted truism that browser development is hideously expensive, but I have my doubts that it's anywhere even barely close to the $500MM they raise. -
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:40:26 JST
Rich Felker
@JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer It's not. A big part of what Google bought by funding Mozilla was the myth that browser development is that expensive, to scare anyone else away from doing it.
I'd estimate you'd want a team of under 10 engineers, mostly self managed like a proper FOSS project.
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Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:40:27 JST
Jess👾
They're spread so thin across all their different nonsense, core development has fallen further and further behind. There's a reason that outside of Firefox, basically nobody else uses Gecko, they just use Chromium. Because it's a shit engine to work with.
@dalias @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer -
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Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 26-Dec-2025 23:43:15 JST
Jess👾
@dalias @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer And plenty of VERY successful FOSS projects raise millions and millions from an annual con.
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Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 04:02:02 JST 
Raven667
@dalias that seems a wildly low estimate of the resources required given the breadth of the web ecosystem in active use. I must be misunderstanding but i would expect to maintain a browser needs closer to 100-500FTE, not 10-50, that lower number would be enough to keep a small fork compiling but thats about it. The browser must be the most complex software project ever attempted by humankind, it is an entire operating system environment in its own right. Each component can use 10-50 people, JavaScript language, JIT and library/API development, Vulkan/OpenGL graphics engine, DOM managment and CSS selectors with quirks along with the CSS rendering pipeline in the graphics subsystem, all the different local APIs and underlying tooling, like SQLite for local data storage, and im only scratching the surface of things that come to mind. Each of those could use a team of experts to maintain it, its not physically possible for one human to be an expert in all the underlying tech that builds a browser and even 10 world class experts probably couldnt understand it all.
Itd be interesting to hear from the lead devs pf Opera/Presto and MS/Edge (before MS/Chromium) to get a level set on how much effort they perceived it would take. Maybe throw in Apple/WebKit (remember them) although i understand they deliberately under-fund the web because it competes with their App Store, theyd much rather take 30% cut from a mobile app which wraps a website than have mobile websites work to their full potential, removing the justification for a dedicated app.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 04:23:05 JST
Rich Felker
@raven667 @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer Anyone who thinks it's even possible to utilize over 100 or even over 50 FTEs on a software project has never read the classic on this topic.
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Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 04:30:41 JST
Raven667
@dalias ive read Brooks, a long time ago for sure, but while the ideal team size might be around 10, software projects are routinely larger than that and were even in Brooks day, which is why they are broken into team-sized components which integrate according to Conways law.
I feel like i must be missing something because this communication doesnt quite make sense to me, like we are talking past each other in some way
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 04:43:33 JST
Rich Felker
@raven667 @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer A team much larger than 10 isn't going to get you better or faster results, only more lines of code to do less. This doesn't change with time. It's fundamental.
The only way to have successful larger projects is to factor them to be almost entirely decoupled. This can be done somewhat with a browser. But I still don't buy that you need a larger team. You'd be better off with a smaller team, since most of the decoupled components are write once then low maintenance, and you don't want a motivation to keep churn going to keep FTEs busy rather than them just moving on to next component.
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Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 05:03:36 JST
Raven667
@dalias @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer maybe thats the confusion, im not talking about having a single undifferentiated team of 50-500 people, the communication overhead to coordinate the work would be impossible, but i fundamentally dont believe that a single team of devs could spin all the plates which keep a browser working and add new UI features, implement new web standards, refactor code for changes in the OS platfoms, improve perrformance and sandboxing and be competant to fix bugs across the entirety of tech which makes up a browser. That team size is enough to maintain a branch of a fork and keep it building but not much more. Imho.
I mean, we are just chatting about our opinions here and what we think is more likely, there are no stakes here, i dont need to convince you, you dont need to convince me, we are just sharing and making sure our opinions are understood, even if they differ. I think we are probably close to having that understanding.
I do also think that the major browser devs being large companies (since Opera/Presto is no longer with us) that the standards committies have a bias toward complex problems with complex solutions that only the members have the resources to implement, a side effect that is not in their interest to alleviate.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 05:13:28 JST
Rich Felker
@raven667 @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer A lot of the things you described are churn that shouldn't be happening. We don't need constant UI redesigns. Code should not need refactoring for "changes in the OS platforms". Sandboxing should be done right from the beginning and absolute (zero access to system facilities or other privilege domains from the virtual machine) not something that needs retrofit improvements.
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Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 07:31:12 JST
Raven667
@dalias maybe but you seem to be describing a simplified and idealized version of reality than what exists. I agree that UI redesigns are more often about some anonymous dev working for a promotion rather than the needs of users, and why the minimal resource needs of Firefox or Chromium are less than their current budget, but i dont think it is as much less as you seem to.
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 07:43:11 JST
Rich Felker
@raven667 @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer I'm talking about doing a good job of making a browser, not repeating the paths Mozilla or Google took.
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Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 08:21:56 JST
Raven667
@dalias maybe you are defining a browser differently as well, for a new from-scratch engine to replace Firefox and Chromium its going to have to do substantially everything that a modern browser does, you dont get to redefine the problem as just document management, all the webapps have to work too, including the features you personally dont agree with or think are stupid, or people arent going to switch. You can differentiate on UI, privacy/security, professional features for researchers, but you cant drop widevine or break webrtc or whatever because potential users arent going to put up with Netflix or Teams not working, even if those companies are hostile to your effort and actively trying to undermine you.
Its not hopeless or anything, Servo exists and is making slow steady progress, but its unlikely to be as influential as FF 10+ years ago
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Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 27-Dec-2025 08:25:54 JST
Rich Felker
@raven667 @JessTheUnstill @yannsionneau @doctormo @daniel_bohrer I'm not talking about excluding functionality needed to access the real web.
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