
Browser Engines 2015: Commit Rates and Active Developer Counts - molsson
http://mo.github.io/2015/11/04/browser-engines-active-developers-and-commit-rates.html
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pcwalton
One thing to note is that the Chromium and Mozilla repos host browsers as well
as engines, whereas the WebKit and Servo repos host engines only. (The most
prominent browser front-end projects are Safari, desktop and mobile, and
browser.html respectively, which are hosted in separate repositories.)

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Manishearth
Also Chromium and mozilla-central are monorepos, servo/servo is only part of
all the Servo code. There are a bunch of other repos under servo/. We also
rely on some major Rust libraries like hyper, but those could be excluded.

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mccr8
This probably doesn't affect the author and commit stats for mozilla-central
all that much. The various upstream libraries we use are updated infrequently,
in single commits.

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Manishearth
I'm not talking about upstream libraries (we have those too, like hyper).

The libraries under github.com/servo are just Servo components (some of them
are used by other people, though) which are in different repos. These are
maintained by the Servo team and in many cases Servo-specific, for example our
HTML parser, CSS parser, URL library, and our layers/geometry logic. Also,
eventually, most of our rendering logic.

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kibwen
Wow, I did not expect that Servo would be comparable to Webkit in number of
unique authors per month, as young as it is. I know the Servo devs put a great
deal of effort into outreach and making it easy for new contributors to jump
in, and that appears to have paid off. :)

EDIT: Actually, now I'm curious about the methodology of how the numbers are
collected. I know that Servo is designed to consistent of independent
components contained in separate repositories whereas IIRC mozilla-central is
fairly monolithic, so if you look only at the repo at
[https://github.com/servo/servo](https://github.com/servo/servo) you may be
underestimating the the activity on the project.

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deegles
800 developers on Chromium seems like an insane number! What are the biggest
projects they're working on?

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trengrj
80M dollars a year and you get to control the future of the internet. It seems
like it would be worth paying this if you were a large corporate or goverment,
especially Google with its need to control the default search engine.
Especially considering they were paying 300M a year for Mozilla to have google
as the default.

~~~
rockdoe
I think you're understating the developer cost. Google pays pretty well and
there's quite a bit of overhead (management, HR, IT, etc) as the original
graph only counted pure developers.

Still yes, I agree that a few hundred million a year gets you control of the
Internet.

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userbinator
It'd be interesting to see similar stats for less well-known browsers like
NetSurf and Dillo, which are also far simpler. I doubt they have anywhere near
as many developers as the big ones, but as the saying goes, "quantity is not
quality"...

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pluma
Thank you to the author for making the colours easily distinguishable for
people with colour vision deficiencies in most of the graphs. Graphs like
these tend to be spectacularly bad at this, putting aesthetics over
accessibility.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Why is pre-fork WebKit shown under the colour for Blink? Blink didn't exist in
2001.

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molsson
There is one line/series for the blink _repo_ which also contains all of the
webkit history. The line for webkit also contains an identical webkit history
for the pre-fork period and by chance blink was rendered on top which is kind
of unfortunate indeed. In the interactive version you can click the checkbox
in the legend to hide a particular series and then it becomes easier to see
why it looks the way it does.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ahh, I see. Thanks for responding.

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mook
I find it interesting that, in the third graph (commits/dev), the Mozilla line
gets a dip to about half its previous value as the Chromium line shows up,
somewhere around mid-2008. Post-dip the jitter also seems to decrease.

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dao-
Google used to pay/employ a number of people working at Mozilla who were then
pulled to work on Chrome. This includes former Firefox lead developer Ben
Goodger, for instance. I think Mozilla was still using CVS at that time, so
the loss of a few central devs doing lots of commits for others would explain
the drop.

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mook
Wouldn't that increase the commits/dev metric, if there are fewer (highly
active) devs, but a reasonably similar amount of commits? Having it drop would
actually mean that the Google folks had a higher-than-average number of
commits of their own code (as opposed to committing for other people). Unless,
of course, they were committing for folks that also worked on Mozilla without
their own commit access, and that second group went away.

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outside1234
What is Intel contributing to Chromium? That was a surprise.

~~~
rockdoe
Intel contributed support for hardware accelerated VP8 encoding to Firefox.
Given that its mostly used for WebRTC I could imagine they did the same for
Chrome.

