There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

The web standards are growing faster than non-profit engines can implement them. Google & Apple are bloating the web specs in what looks like regulatory capture.

If Blink/Webkit dominate for long enough, they will lock everything down with DRMs & WEI. Maybe it's time to work on lighter protocols like Gopher & Gemini that don't need 20GB of RAM to open 20 tabs ?

▲

tziki 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Having a "lighter standard" simply means people will have to write native apps, one per platform. I understand Apple wants this, but for Mozilla that should be the antithesis of what they're trying to achieve.

	▲	arnaudsm 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The standard can be forward compatible. A light website is always great, you're using one right now.

▲

vanviegen 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> There's an elephant in the room: why is maintaining a web browser costing $400M/y?

Is that actually the case though? I find it hard to believe that Mozilla has anywhere close to 1500 senior developers working on just Firefox. My guess is that the bulk of that money is spent on unrelated adventures and overhead.

▲

arnaudsm 5 days ago | parent [-]

Google Chrome is likely around $400M, while Mozilla's core browser team is around $200M but are technologically far behind. Hard to find precise numbers, it's just an order of magnitude estimate

	▲	lukeschlather 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In what sense is Mozilla behind? Chrome is an advertising delivery platform, they have fundamentally different goals and that $400M they spend on Chrome is not mostly going to technology that I want in my browser, that's the point. Just because Chrome builds telemetry features doesn't mean Mozilla needs them too.