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klingonopera

Those 500 million are easily eclipsed if you compare it to what Google's revenue is...

EDIT: It was 136 billion in 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

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And Google builds only a browser? What's the budget of the Google Chrome team?

Mozilla doesn't build only a browser either and as a Rust user, am glad they don't.

The Rust community prides itself on being independent from Mozilla, when their relationship is pointed out, but now Rust is suddenly a major beneficiary of those 500 million?

They do build only a browser.

> The Rust community prides itself on being independent from Mozilla, when their relationship is pointed out

In terms of decision making, Rust is definitely a community oriented project, but there's not denying reality and at present practically all of Rust core devs who work on it full-time are paid by Mozilla.

Were Mozilla to pull out support, development would likely continue, but at a much, much reduced pace.

> a major beneficiary of those 500 million

I agree with you that the vast majority of it is not going to Rust and I do wish they'd increase the share of their revenue that goes to engineering from 45% to something closer to 85%.

If you’re wondering who spends more on their browser team, Google does

But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome.

And even if it was, Mozilla shouldn't try to chase that revenue. It should generate only enough revenue to sustain and futher develop web technologies which allow people to stay free on the web.

> But Google's revenue isn't only generated by Chrome.

It has been driven by chrome though (by having improved web standards in general - note the past-tense). However the future is looking far more murky, now on top they are making changes that benefit only google (crippling ad blockers for one).

The majority of Google's revenue is generated through websites accessed via browsers. I don't know how much Google spends on controlling the browser market with Chrome, but I have little doubt that Google would spend a billion per year on it if they had to.

Even though Google is 250 times or so bigger, the point is still valid. Where the hell money gets spent? That kind of revenues are huge for any software company, especially for a one that is just making a browser.

Just making a browser? It's the piece of software I'd least be willing to touch. Even Microsoft gave up and switched their core to Chromium.

Considering that, it's quite amazing that Mozilla is capable of not just making a browser, but also an email client, with a budget of 500 million.

MS didn't give up, their new strategy is similar to Google's, so they teamed up with Google to make Chrome an even better spying machine. They just have to change the telemetry URL in the source and replace the Google log in with their own.

Microsoft still makes a browser; they just don't make their own rendering engine anymore. Which makes sense because it's hard and Blink works just fine. I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. The Vivaldi folks are using that strategy and managing to make the best web browser out there with what I assume must be a microscopic fraction of $500 million/yr.

And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million budget goes. They're not rewriting the entire thing every year.

> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing.

Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There's a vague sense that a technology monoculture is unhealthy, but I would argue that the real threat is a browser monoculture, and Mozilla apparently can't stop that from happening with their current strategy because Firefox is losing.

Given the rise of devices with many cores that are not particularly powerful, technology that moves web page rendering to a multithreaded model, like Servo and WebRender will only become more important, no?

I disagree, it's a good thing that Mozilla develops their own engine, this way, when we give either browser some data, we can verify that both engines are doing what they're supposed to be doing by comparing the results, and they should be the same.

If we switch to a single, universal engine for all browsers, bugs, faults and errors in that engine may slip through, and no one would really notice for absence of comparison.

Brave is trying that approach. It feels like an uphill battle, but time will tell.

Chromium based Edge is definitely much more than the rendering engine. Do they use their own networking, process management, Javascript engine, extension system? It is probably still 80-90% chromium.

Rendering/layout engine is an admittedly sloppy term referring to the whole stack, except for the JavaScript engine.

I think my point is still valid, that Microsoft hasn't given up on their browser, just most of the technology underlying it - which their users don't care about. The fact that Edge is a pretty decent epub reader (for now... https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/2...) isn't necessarily tied to the fact that it's EdgeHTML based. If they wanted to, Microsoft could implement the same feature set on top of Chromium.

The most recent financial statement I could see is from 2017: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. Other major expenses were $66 million for marketing (yay Moz://a!), $72 million for the dubious "general and administrative" category, a few million here and there for other things, and the rest went into the $500 million nest egg.

So they could certainly spend a lot more on Firefox if needed, but it's not evident to me that Firefox's weaknesses are money related.

> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox.

I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period.

* Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwi...)

* They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/)

* They were building a file-sharing service (https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

* They were building a new VR-first browser and content aggregator (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now...)

>They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/) //

Wasn't HIBP a single person.

So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team?

Looking at the Send github (https://github.com/mozilla/send/graphs/contributors) it's essentially 2 people, about 1.5 person years in the commits.

The first and fourth items you list sound like absolute white elephants that management should have allowed only as "we'll give you a full time dev wage for it and spare facilities, show us what you can do and we might take it on".

So, what have we got left $240M?

The examples were intended to illustrate the point that Mozilla has a lot of non-Firefox software development going on, not to be an exhaustive accounting of everything they do. But even so, I have to question only allocating $13 million to the items I listed. Particularly Firefox OS and Firefox Reality. Those are big projects. The blog post I linked even has a pull quote emphasizing how much work the latter was:

> We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser. – Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla

Even something like Firefox Monitor has lots of design work and art assets and backend infrastructure and management overhead that makes it not as trivial as you make it sound.

>General and administrative expenses pertain to operation expenses rather than to expenses that can be directly related to the production of any goods or services, including rent, utilities, insurance, and managerial salaries....Examples of general and administrative expenses include building rent, consultant fees, depreciation on office equipment, insurance, supplies, subscriptions, and utilities. Salary and benefits attributable to corporate management, as well as any legal staff, are also classified as general and administrative expenses.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-and-administrat...

Doesn't sound 'dubious' to me.

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