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Comment by vorticalbox | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark

while also

> Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox

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And on macOS, Safari beats the pants off of Chrome by an even larger margin.

Safari only has to worry about one OS. Not just one OS but also a single line of hardware. Very easy to optimize for. It's why iPhones have tiny batteries compared to their competitors but still deliver competitive, and usually superior, battery life

Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that

fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.

I wouldn't, firefox has less resources and faced an uphill battle for years. The fact that they keep improving regularly and significantly, even though late on some front is applaud worthy to me.

Can someone tell me how much Chrome has in terms of resources? Firefox, a company with one main product, has hundreds of millions of dollars coming in + millions in donations. That should pay for a sizeable engineering team.

Is the Chrome engineering team much larger? Is the V8 team larger than the SpiderMonkey team, significantly so?

Donations don't pay for Firefox development. Chromium is a bit more than Google these days. Mozilla's largest failure to date has been their inability to attract other significant corporate interest, which Google has done with Chromium

Drawing a precise boundary around "Chrome" is hard, since many people work on it part time, or are associated with tangentially related projects, like the skia graphics engine, v8 javascript engine, etc.

However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/pulse

And I would guess the Chrome team is probably 3-5x that, since many people may not be working on code, may not commit directly, or might be working on big things on branches and didn't commit anything this week. Also, that doesn't count work on external dependencies, which are counted as "autoroll bots".

3000 engineers * $200k average total comp = $600M. It's in the same ballpark as mozilla's total revenues.

Average total comp for an FAANG engineer in the US is more like $450k, and last time I heard numbers, Chrome and adjacent teams were more like 4,000 people.

Which average is that? Don't think it's median W2 income.

Yeah it seems a touch low. I'm not at one of the big boys and $200k is more like base salary then total comp. RSUs show up on a W2.

I guess Mozilla engineers are paid quite a bit less. They hire the people with a conscience, so don't need to pay the 'do evil' salary premium...

> However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code direct to chromium in the last week:

This also includes all people from outside the org (Google), right?

I found this but I think it's for Chrome? There are also things like v8 engine.

> The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.) Feb 22, 2019

I don't really think it's fair to extrapolate github contributors into FTE employees paid by Google, let alone to throw out a '3-5x' number on top.

Manual inspection of todays commits shows that nearly all of them are @chromium.org email addresses, which usually means a google full time engineer. There are some from other companies (microsoft, intel, nvidia). None from random hobbyists that I saw.

OK and that makes perfect sense.

But then saying "therefor other days I expect those other engineers were @chromium", not so much. I expect that the vast majority of contributors are making ~1 commit and then never again.

It also doesn't take into account that the project is over a decade old and many people who have committed to it as FTEs are no longer doing so.

Unfortunately the money for within Mozilla is not that straightforward in favor of Firefox and I imagine I am not the only Firefox user who is incredibly annoyed with that. I'd rather send money to individual devs' Github Sponsors sounds than give Mozilla a donation the devs will never see a cent of.

Optimizing for benchmarks tends to not work all that well for real-world sites. I wouldn't worry about it.

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