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Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

Just some quick numbers:

$585,000 comes out to 0.1778116% (almost two tenths of one percent) of Mozilla's 2015 revenue of $329,000,000.

As an avid Firefox user since 2007, upon learning a few years ago how much revenue Mozilla takes in, I've always wondered where the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent... I was talking with a colleague about Servo, and was saying, "If they spent allocated 5% of that revenue on Servo, they could hire 70 developers year round at $235,000 each to work on Servo full time, year-round."

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Servo is one of a hundred initiatives that they have. They have been developing the Rust Language itself, and all the tooling around it. They are trying to kill PDF plugins with PDF.js. They are trying to kill closed source video codecs with Dalaa. They have been trying to improve online collaboration, multimedia, 3D, and a zillion other things.

They also help with web standards, documentation, legal battles, and advocacy.

http://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/

We also have a web browser with a decent following. That takes a good chunk of engineers to keep up and running.

what's it called?

Netscape Navigator 2.01

Forget it. Stick with Mosaic.

Why do I get a certificate warning on https://www.mozillalabs.com/en-US/projects/ which indicates its webserver is showing a certificate from www.github.com?

Mozilla Labs is no longer active. There is a Research group however: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/

They work on Rust and Servo (among other things.)

Still- that's a lot of money. Here's the breakdown for 2014:

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

Their financial statements are public[1]. In 2014 they spent 212m in software development. I couldn't find an org chart but you can imagine the breadth of work spanning from Firefox and web standards to privacy, vr, servo, rust etc.

[1] https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...

While it would be nice to see Servo take off and kick butt, it's generally also more wasteful to square wave the funding than increasing funding gradually, thanks to code churn and architectural learning that occurs in the course of a project. It's not just that you can't cook a baby faster by hiring more chefs. Any code written before Rust 1.0 got frozen had an extra work factor applied to its expected future maintenance cost, as does any that relies on some architectural decision that they later discover needs to be modified, and also new hires are going to be more inefficient for longer when you have a larger proportion of them.

> "If they spent allocated 5% of that revenue on Servo, they could hire 70 developers year round at $235,000 each to work on Servo full time, year-round."

Firefox is a shipping product and Servo is a research project.

Components from Servo are making their way to Firefox as both sides are ready, and parts of Firefox are being written/re-written in Rust as well:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

So over time it's certainly possible that more engineers will be allocated to Rust/Servo related projects, as they make their way into shipping products.

Since they are non-profit you can just look up what they are spending their money on.

Slightly Off Topic: I could never understand how browsers made money, So if somehow i fork an browser and manage to market it to 10M users, all of a sudden i get money?

Edit: I know they are from Ads and searches, but i never quite grasps the economics behind it.

Search engines pay Firefox (and probably other browsers?) to direct traffic to them through the browser search box/awesomebar. I don't know the specifics, but I think a firefox-specific query parameter is included in the searches.

If you want to do this on your own I guess you'd have to make deals with the search companies? I don't think folks will automatically start paying you :)

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