Can you explain how? Or is your argument "One guy in a basement in Bulgaria could build Firefox for 50 Stotinki."?
=== ANNUAL COSTS ===
20 developers at $150k each = $3M
Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M
Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it)
Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M
2 x Marketing peeps = $250k
Other expenses (travel, rubber ducks etc.) = $1M
I literally pulled these figures out my ass (as you can no doubt tell!) but lets add it up:
$3M + $1.5M + $0.25M + $1M + $0.25M + $1M = $7M per year.
That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
Hypothetically, if I was given the money and asked to build a team to fork Firefox I'd be more focused. Way more!
The current devs work on stuff I'd scrap like Pocket, telemetry, anything with AI, and so on. I bet there is a load of stuff in there that I'd want out! There's probably a bunch of things in Firefox Labs they're working on too.
So, I'd argue that 20 good devs (again, a number I pulled out of the air!) split into, say, 4 smaller teams could achieve a shit load of work under the right circumstances, with the right leadership and so on.
I'm currently a senior architect with over 50 devs below me. Most are mid-level at best (not a slur, just where they are in their career!) but the few good ones are very good. A team of 20 of those could pull it off!
It'd be a tall order building a browser from scratch with 20 devs maybe but it's already built.
Anyway, all the heavy-lifting is done: The JS engine, the CSS engine and so on.
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
The guys I work with are on about £95k and the good ones are very good.
I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc. (oh, and being left alone by interfering management!)
I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
Anyway, this was all just a bit of fun :)
Still you need to spend at least $250K (which direct compensation would be close to $150K) to hire a competent browser dev. And I'm not speaking about SF... Well you can have better cost efficiency outside American metros, but the reality is that experienced browser devs are rare outside those areas.
> I have seen what small teams of good devs can do with the right environment, scope, tools etc.
Not objecting that disruptions can be done with a small focused team. But here we're talking about dealing with massive complexity, not an emerging market. You cannot "redefine" the problem here, the ecosystem is mess and we've got to live with it for a good time...
> I'm talking about a cut-down Firefox, stripped of all the bullshit in the background, just a browser that shows webpages... all the heavy lifting is done: CSS engine, JS engine etc.
You will be surprised to know how small the core engine parts are to the total code base. You may argue that most of those are not necessary and perhaps half of them are pretty much ad-hoc complexity but the rest have their own reason to exist. And the new browser engine developers typically learn this hard way then decides to fall back to Chromium. I've seen this several times.