Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by jpetso on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @07:47AM (#24131030)

I was part of the BlackBerry browser team in the days of BlackBerry losing the mobile market. We maxed out somewhere between 50 and 100 people working on the mobile browser, and that doesn't include business/marketing because it was just a part of the overall smartphone product.

Maintaining a browser is an immense undertaking. With 50 full-time contributors, you may just about be able to provide a functional chrome to Blink (then WebKit) that doesn't suck too badly and keeps up with the performance and web standards requirements that Google in particular keeps pushing forward.

100 people is in no way enough to make both production-quality browser chrome and browser engine on your own, become the cutting edge for performance and privacy improvements, keep up with and participate in standards development, plus whatever auxiliary supporting efforts are necessary when your browser is the main product as opposed to supporting a cashflow-rich ad or app store business.

Sure, you can build a Chromium derivative for early adopters or crypto enthusiasts with a handful of people and a bunch of VC money. But what Mozilla does is more important, and has a much larger scope. They may survive with 100 people for a while, they would be a far cry from being relevant though.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by jacquesm on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @03:46PM (#24136017)

That's actually useful information. There are 750FTE at Mozilla. How many of those do you think would it take to do the best job possible on the browser. That would give one way of calculating a budget.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by jpetso on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @07:51PM (#24138490)

Hard to say, and I suck really bad at estimates. If I low-ball it at maybe 200-300, that's likely off by a factor or three. A possibly old but close enough page on chromium.org lists the following teams:

    Animations Team
    Binding Team
    Device Team
    DevTools
    DOM Team
    Ecosystem infra
    Input Team
    Layout Team
    Paint Team
    Rendering Core
    Speed Metrics Team
    Style Team
    Web Capabilities (Project Fugu)
    Worker Team

and that looks like it's only focused on Blink, not including the actual chrome (desktop/mobile apps) or V8 which would both be substantial efforts as well. Who knows how much technology is pulled from other teams at Google, like video encoding for WebRTC, server performance collaboration for the SPDY/QUIC effort, low-level storage for IndexedDB, devrel with buggy websites or certificate authorities, security audits and whatnot?

For doing the "best job possible", you can probably blow up team size by a lot, there are numerous tasks that would benefit from more attention and I'm sure Mozilla are already making hard trade-offs at their current staffing levels (which obviously include a lot of people outside of Firefox engineering).

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by jacquesm on Thursday August 13, 2020 @03:11PM (#24147087)

Interesting that 'factor of three' puts it within the range of the number of employees Mozilla currently has. That means that the browser is already in danger if they do other stuff besides. Hm. That's more urgent than I thought it would be.

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Re:Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on comm... by jpetso on Thursday August 13, 2020 @04:54PM (#24148960)

To clarify, I wrote "factor OR three", by which I meant to emphasize my complete lack of certainty regarding the "best possible" performance you asked about. I'll only commit to my earlier statement about the definite irrelevance below 100 people.

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