Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.
A few pints about Ladybird:
* It's an awesome project, and they appear to be pretty efficient. * Greenfield projects always move faster than big codebases that are 30 years old. * Bigger teams always have more overhead than smaller teams. * Ladybird only does a small fraction of the things Firefox does. It's an important fraction, but still a small one. * The Ladybird GitHub repository has 1.3k contributors. Not sure where the number 10 comes from. * Only part of the people at Mozilla are engineers working on Firefox. There's also management, legal, marketing, HR and all the other folks you need to run a corporation. There's also engineers working on other products, backend services and infrastructure not required by Ladybird in its current stage.
None of the points above are quantitative, so Ladybird and Firefox are also hard to compare. I personally do think the Firefox org at Mozilla is pretty efficient for what it is; not based on the points above, but rather based on having worked at Mozilla for more than six years.
in a couple of years they built the engine from scratch. it's going to soon enter Alpha. how many people from ladybird built that engine? about 10?
all while everyone has said that modern web makes this task impossible
Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than Ladybird.
point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.
About ladybird, I think it is quite a good benchmark:
- they have accomplished a task many thought impossible in the modern world
- they accomplished it while having a handful of people
- they had a fraction of resources compared to both google and Mozilla. only about a year ago they had few hundred of thousands as support money to get them started.
The engine may not be finished yet. may not be as performant as the other two. but they did a 3rd engine. and given 10% of the budget Mozilla has, they would progress much more. Ladybird Team has shown how everything about Mozilla is mismanaged and simply broken.