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> You don't need 200M to develop firefox. Based on what logic? It's 20+ million lines of code touching half if the "hard" problems of computer programming - graphics, fonts, encodings, localization, JIT engines, hardware acceleration, support for multiple architectures (including aforementioned JIT), support for multiple operating systems, massive parallelism, sandboxing, WASM support, hardware support abstractions like WebUSB and WebMIDI, etc, and a massive swamp of compatiblity hacks, and literally books worth of new standards they have to implement every year. Much of which has to be as high performance as possible while simultaneously not being ludicrously insecure, because the threat environment is basically as hostile as it gets. The fastest way to "become a lean organization" would be to just give up and become yet another Chromium clone. Barring that, they have a lot of software to maintain if they want a truly independent browser. A modern browser is comparable in effort to supporting an entire operating system, because that's what browsers kind of are nowadays. About the only other option is to lay off all their staff in SF and Paris and other HCoL areas and relocate to Central and Eastern Europe. |
The specific number they pay is also not that relevant, what I am concerned about is their position. They have one "customer" that enables their entire operation. That is bad for any organization, if that is also your main competition you are in an even worse spot. The longterm sustainability of Mozilla depends on being able to operate independently from Google funding.