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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

Why Mozilla has almost 1,000 employees blows my mind. Isn't this an project for an open source web browser?

How many people do you think a browser's team + all components + support + management + marketing + finances need? Chromium alone has 1700+ contributors (https://github.com/chromium/chromium), Firefox has hundreds of "core contributors" (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community#Core_Contributor) and many more beyond those.

But what percentage of those 1000 are developers working on the browser?

Contributors can be external people including random guy fixing a typo.

Chromium is known to be a fairly well-staffed project; it’s really not a great example to compare against.

What would you compare it against? It's the most similar project I can think of.

The Safari/WebKit team is much more reasonable, with probably an average of one to two hundred people working on it at any given time (this is a bit complicated to measure, since many people move around between the browser and related teams like Mail or CFNetwork–and not to mention the various non-developer roles that only work part-time on Safari–but it should be accurate to an order of magnitude).

I'm sure there are lots of other engineering teams at Apple focused on security, build systems, developer tools, infrastructure, etc that the Safari/Webkit team relies on.

Then there are all the non-engineering functions like HR, marketing, etc.

Mozilla has to do all of that.

I'm including all of that in that number, the actual organization's full-time engineer count for it is probably half that. Also, I am excluding people working on things used by Safari but general purpose and part of the OS, such as system libraries and platform security features (many of which Chrome and Firefox use themselves).

It fell victim to the same problem as Wikimedia, a kind of Dutch Disease: The web browser was too good, they earned so much money in donations from it that it attracted freeloading middle managers and do-gooders who don't give a flying f about the browser, but started empire-building with vague new "missions".

Not really. It's an organization dedicated to promoting lofty ideals for the Internet as a whole. It was pretty cool while it lasted.

Besides trying to prevent the Web not to turn into ChromeOS (before it was WinOS), top quality browser engines don't get coded during weekends.

The bulk of open-source code is written by employees of corporations.

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