Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

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For starters Mozilla could operate with a much smaller footprint, much less projects in parallel and less vanity projects. That would reduce the amount of money required by a lot, which is the big problem in the first place.

Developing a browser isn't easy and requires a few teams of developers, but in 2020 it spent 242 million dollars in software development costs, 137 million dollars in administrative costs and 37 million dollars in marketing and branding costs. I don't live in a lala land where I think you can develop a browser for free, but I think we can all agree that you don't need to spend this amount of money on it either. Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser?

In terms of funding, they got 440 million dollars from royalties (what they get from setting default search engines on their browser) and 25 million dollars in subscription revenue (Pocket and VPN subscriptions type things - products they actually sell).

Now, can you develop a browser on 25 million dollars per year? Maybe it's cutting it short, but for sure there could be a strategy to invest more on this side of the equation to phase out the need to be Google's bitch in a more intentional way.

Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...

> Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost?

100-200 developers probably roughly costs on the order of 25-50 million a year (assuming a made up number of 250k fully loaded cost with benefits and taxes, which might be lower or higher than their average, idk. This number seems almost too conservative to my gut). From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone.

> Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser?

If you don't want them to leave to work on safari or chrome, probably? This experiment was more or less tried by opera, right?

Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome. Opera similarly gave up selling their own browser engine and cut their development teams while switching to another wrapper on blink. Firefox could become yet another skinning of blink and chrome code, but it's not clear to me how that's helping them with being "Google's bitch in a more intentional way".

I think there are problems with Mozilla's side project expenditures, there is definitely some bloat, and they have had some expensive failures like Firefox phone. However I don't think Mozilla could have survived without Google's funding and people vastly underestimate how expensive quality software is.

>Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome

Chromium get contributions from a few big companies, why couldn't Mozilla create a "contributor community group" something like Java has? Oracle keeps control over Java but there is a democratic process on what gets into Java/JDK. At some point Samsung was contributing to servo when it still was experimental.

> why couldn't Mozilla create a "contributor community group" something like Java has?

Mozilla regularly accepts code from unpaid community members and has since its inception.

>Mozilla regularly accepts code from unpaid community members and has since its inception.

Yes, so it Java and Google and Microsoft... you're still missing the point I made there. Make Servo a cross-company product serving more than just Firefox. More companies contribute to it, lower costs of development.

There's good developers living in regions where 50k is a really excellent salary. Even 100k. I agree with the parent poster that SF salaries are crazy for a product like this.

Even 100k salary is like 130k with benefits and taxes, so 200 developers takes out 26 million, above the subscription revenue without counting for any overhead like infrastructure, ops and administration. And below 100k, I think you will struggle to hire enough with the skills you need, browser dev is hairy and hard, and you are competing against an extremely well funded project in Chrome.

I don't doubt there are developers being paid peanuts with more talent than I will ever see, but I haven't seen them and I know a lot of people spending a lot of money looking, which suggests to me they are rare and hard to build a team out of.

And if they found them, and they fired all the senior bay area folks and rehired these 100k developers tomorrow, are those developers experienced writing fault tolerant c++ in a multi-decade codebase? And if so, how many will relocate or take remote jobs for way higher salaries after a couple years? Google, Amazon and Microsoft would be happy to have them and pay 300k+ TC for those skills, as well as countless banks and fintech firms.

I was considering 100k including everything :)

Here in Spain (which is a first-world country :) a good dev would make about 50k or so..

I think the Silicon Valley area has really skewed expectations of salary (and of course living expenses!). Familiarity with codebase is a problem indeed, but they could start setting up a hub somewhere in Europe.

I think part of the problem is that when they incorporated Mozilla they started thinking as a corporation. Multi-million-dollar-paid CEOs, top-heavy with marketing etc. They should have stayed nonprofit IMO.

> From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone.

Did you mean subscription business? Like I mentioned, the royalties were 440 million which is way larger than 25-50. If you put 200 developers on this project, with fully loaded costs of 400k / year each, that's 80 million dollars per year. You add 20 million dollars for administrative and other expenses and we come to 100 million dollars per year burn rate.

In 2020 they made ~25M on subscriptions, if 50 of the 200 developers focus on improving the subscription business, at the current rate of growth they had from 2019-2020, in a few years they could totally phase out of needing royalties at all to cover their $100M / year expenses, with 200 developers earning competitive salaries.

Yes, sorry, I meant non-royalties business. I don't believe the kind of growth you mentioned is likely, but maybe I am missing things about their business. I think they bet big on diversifying with other initiatives like Firefox phone that just didn't hit, lots of browser things like you were talking about.

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