[mmahemoff]

Which would be a ton of cash for most applications, but this is a web browser and they are in direct competition with not just one, but several, of the biggest companies in the world. Here are their 2014 revenues: $86 billion (MS), $182 billion, $66 billion. Budgets for the other browsers aren't clearly defined, but we do know it's a big focus for all the manufacturers and they each have major incentives to keep users inside their own ecosystem.

Even just keeping up with all the standards, and contributing to them, is an enormous undertaking at this point in the web's evolution. Let alone UI design, devtools, porting to mobile OSs, etc.

[mc808]

I'm fairly sure the revenue attributable to Firefox dwarfs what any of the bigger competitors are spending on their browsers, so it's not really for lack of resources if Firefox falls behind. But it's the cash cow that subsidizes pretty much everything Mozilla does, some of which is great and some dubious. Everyone can make their own case for which projects are great and which are iffy.

Personally, I would think an e-mail client is the perfect complement to browser development, and something that could/should be another significant source of revenue instead of a burden.

[bzbarsky]

> I'm fairly sure the revenue attributable to Firefox dwarfs what any of the bigger competitors are spending on their browsers

I suspect you would be wrong at least for the cases of Google and Microsoft. I don't have a good feel for how many people Apple has working on Safari and WebKit, but both the Chrome and IE teams are significantly bigger than the Firefox team from what I can tell, and probably more expensive unless you think Google and Microsoft pay developers less than Mozilla does. Let me ask you this: how many people do you think Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google each have working on their respective browsers? Ballpark figures, of course.

Also, estimates are that the money Google spends annually just _advertising_ Chrome in the last few years (TV ad campaigns with Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, worldwide ads on public transit, etc) is comparable to the entire annual revenue attributable to Firefox.