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

by deegles 11y ago

samfisher83 11y ago
I agree that seems like too many people working on it. I think brooks law would start to dominate.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  Just look at the number of libraries (even project specific ones) Chromium pulls in. The projects are huge enough to accommodate quite a few people.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Presumably the number isn't counting the individual commits for the ~175 dependencies that make up src/third_party/ (including large ones like Skia and BoringSSL).
trengrj 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- sam_goody 11y ago
  Chrome sends every URL you type in the search/URL bar to Google. (With the pretext that they need to check if it ia search term.) With Chrome they can build a profile on each user which includes how much time they spend on every site they go to. They can sell and use all this profile data in all sorts of ways. They can fine tune search results to push more sticky sites, since they can aggregate which sites really keep their users. And it means that they can verify that their other tracking cookies and methods are accurate, and can better weed out all sorts of shtick, and pick up the trends before they are bitten. Controlling the internet (by controlling the interface used to reach it) is just the small change.

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

by deegles 11y ago

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

samfisher83 11y ago

I agree that seems like too many people working on it. I think brooks law would start to dominate.

rockdoe 11y ago
Just look at the number of libraries (even project specific ones) Chromium pulls in. The projects are huge enough to accommodate quite a few people.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  Presumably the number isn't counting the individual commits for the ~175 dependencies that make up src/third_party/ (including large ones like Skia and BoringSSL).

trengrj 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
sam_goody 11y ago
Chrome sends every URL you type in the search/URL bar to Google. (With the pretext that they need to check if it ia search term.) With Chrome they can build a profile on each user which includes how much time they spend on every site they go to. They can sell and use all this profile data in all sorts of ways. They can fine tune search results to push more sticky sites, since they can aggregate which sites really keep their users. And it means that they can verify that their other tracking cookies and methods are accurate, and can better weed out all sorts of shtick, and pick up the trends before they are bitten. Controlling the internet (by controlling the interface used to reach it) is just the small change.