[smarnach]

How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers, workplace, HR, legal etc.).

Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.

[Fervicus]

How did you come to the conclusion that it's not? Google being bloated is not a good justification for why Mozilla should be bloated too. Someone in the comment below suggested that Ladybird was built by about 10 people. Call me naive, but I don't think you'd need 75x number of people to work on a browser that's already established for over 2 decades.

[smarnach]

I did not come to any conclusion. I called out a baseless claim.

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.

[Fervicus]

If you have worked at Mozilla then clearly you are going to have a better understanding of the company than I do. But my perspective, and I believe of many others from the outside looking in, is that the company is mismanaged, focusing on the wrong things, and paying their execs way too much.

[criticalfault]

take the reference of ladybird.

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

[squidbeak]

> it's going to soon enter Alpha

Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than Ladybird.

[criticalfault]

that's fine.

point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.

[glenstein]

Wait why is that fine? The whole point was that ladybird is yet to enter alpha which is the very reason why it's not the correct benchmark. And you said the Chrome comparison isn't the correct one but... didn't follow it up with an actual reason.

[criticalfault]

I meant it's fine for others to want to move faster and hire more people (like Google). just replying to your sentence. it's fine for others to want things different...

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.