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0 pointsbrianpgordon6y ago0 comments

> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox.

I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period.

* Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwi...)

* They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/)

* They were building a file-sharing service (https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)

* They were building a new VR-first browser and content aggregator (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now...)

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pbhjpbhj6y ago

>They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/) //

Wasn't HIBP a single person.

So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team?

Looking at the Send github (https://github.com/mozilla/send/graphs/contributors) it's essentially 2 people, about 1.5 person years in the commits.

The first and fourth items you list sound like absolute white elephants that management should have allowed only as "we'll give you a full time dev wage for it and spare facilities, show us what you can do and we might take it on".

So, what have we got left $240M?

brianpgordonOP6y ago

The examples were intended to illustrate the point that Mozilla has a lot of non-Firefox software development going on, not to be an exhaustive accounting of everything they do. But even so, I have to question only allocating $13 million to the items I listed. Particularly Firefox OS and Firefox Reality. Those are big projects. The blog post I linked even has a pull quote emphasizing how much work the latter was:

> We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser. – Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla

Even something like Firefox Monitor has lots of design work and art assets and backend infrastructure and management overhead that makes it not as trivial as you make it sound.

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