[ItsBob]

I know they have way more than that but I'd argue that you don't need that many.

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.

[pseudalopex]

Vivaldi have 29 developers.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork. They couldn't commit to keeping uBlock Origin working.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

[mmooss]

There's someone else right now who is going to important organizations they obviously don't understand, making wild claims about 'I could do it for much less', and cutting personnel drastically.

[summerlight]

You severely underestimate the engineering cost of modern web browser. Assuming a sufficient value-addition fork, a team of 20 cannot even catch up the Chromium upstream. Good luck coming up with a new engine compatible with Chrome; MS tried it and finally gave up.

[ItsBob]

Not sure where the Chromium part comes in but I'm talking about Firefox here.

Anyway, all the heavy-lifting is done: The JS engine, the CSS engine and so on.