At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?
Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).
Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.
I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.
Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).
> so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour
I don't think that's correct. IIUC, Software Dev was 260M for Mozilla + Mozilla Corporation + Mozilla Foundation + MZLA Technologies Corp. + Mozilla Ventures + Mozilla.ai. With large increase of 40M from 2023 to 2022 so I'd bet a good chunk of that is going to Mozilla.ai knowing how the rest of the corporate world is acting right now.
Like the Chrome Mobile team is 40 people [1]. I can't image that web + support is going to more than 4x that so you get to ~160 people which at 300k a head is 48 million. I don't see how out of the 6 organizations that 93% (700/750) of the employees are working on FireFox and not a different thing.
48 million just in salaries against the $494 million that Google gave Mozilla in 2023 just seems like it should be extremely possible to save at least half of it. Sure, we've gone beyond the initial ~$150M but for all (?) of Mozilla's life the payments from Google have covered software development [3] and for Safari the payments were in the billions so if Mozilla focused on making a better browser with higher market share their payments would go up as well.
So one of several teams working on Chrome Mobile (so not the rendering engine, JavaScript engine, etc...) was 40+ people. That tells us nothing about the size of the overall Chrome team.
I have seen comments on HackerNews that estimated 1000-4000 people working on Chrome at Google, but without a sound basis. Chromium had ~800 individuals author a commit, that's probably as close as we can get to actual hard facts.
The Platform Division which includes Chrome was 20.000+ but it's pure guesswork to break out numbers for Chrome for that.
Honestly my prior is that the vast majority of software dev work at Moz goes towards Firefox, I don't see any evidence to the contrary, including in terms of products released/developed. A modern browser is an enormously complex engineering feat, nothing else Moz releases is in that ballpark.
I guess bottom line is that we don't really know the exact breakdown.
Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).