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I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be

I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am too naive or clueless.

astura 9y ago
However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.
- markpapadakis 9y ago
  On the flip-side though, the tools, expertise/skills and means for building browsers some 25+ years ago don't match what's available today.
roca 9y ago
There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be. And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you don't work in this area.
- markpapadakis 9y ago
  I never worked on a browser, though I did implement the HTML5 spec, twice, and I wrote a JS engine(compiler, runtime). I know that it was a lot easier because I could count on infromation and other advances that were available to me, and anyone else really, at the time, the kind of resources and information I probably wouildn't have had access to it("whats javascript?") 20+ years earlier. Browsers have evolved - because standards did, and expections along with them, but in the past they too were quite complex(see also Netscape's play: browsers, email, usenet client etc, suit) and again, it was harder then that it is nowadays to build such systems.
  - roca 9y ago
    Which part of the HTML5 spec, though? A parser? Or the whole thing, including DOM APIs and all the features like media elements and so on? Even an HTML5 parser is harder than it looks to implement to the level needed for a browser. You have to build a proper DOM, you have to be secure against all kinds of fuzzing, you have to implement off-main-thread parsing and speculative readahead for performance, you have integrate it correctly the HTML5 event loop for document.write() etc, you have to support innerHTML and so on. Likewise building a JS engine is impressive, but I do not believe a Web-compatible competitive-performance JS engine can be built by any single person.
    - markpapadakis 9y ago
      The parser. Once for properly parsing HTML content, for a search engine, and the other for a framework used for saving pages (For an Instapaper like service). So it wasn't a big deal, but in both cases, a DOM was constructed and operations were executed against the DOM. Nothing about that or the JS engine is impressive really. That was my point, more or less. Of course, there's a difference between building something that works, and something that works exceptionally works etc etc(all the stuff on top of that), but all told, I still don't think building a browser justifies assembling such a huge org, even if there is no reliance on third-party technologies.
      - chrismorgan 9y ago
        Implementing an HTML parser is not hard—the spec is a book of instructions on what to do. Implementing a fast HTML parser that will produce a fast DOM is a little harder. Tying it in with a fast CSS engine is harder still. Tying it in with a JavaScript engine is a bit more work as well. Implementing layout is moderately fiendishly difficult to do and get right. And it just gets harder the more of the web platform you add, and the more it has to be fast.
      - roca 9y ago
        HTML5 parsing is maybe 1% of the HTML5 spec.
    - 9y ago
- gsnedders 9y ago
  > There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Scope differences make it incredibly hard. Plenty of people on the Blink team work on things like Skia, which neither the WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of (because they just leverage OS-specific APIs), or on their HTTP/TLS stack (again, neither WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of), etc. Gecko is somewhere in a middle-ground; they rely on third party libraries (including Skia—does that make that part of the Chrome team Blink/Gecko developers?) but not quite as much as WebKit and EdgeHTML do. Core web stuff? The Blink team is larger, yes, but by how much is a hard question. FWIW, I believe the Gecko team is nowadays larger than the EdgeHTML team, but they're certainly close in size. (And close to the size of the old Presto team, which admittedly had a scope closer to that of the Blink team.)
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    Gecko also has its own infra/productivity/etc folks, whereas I bet these folks are from a much larger shared team at the big companies
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      The Chrome team has a lot of its own infra due to policy that a lot of Chromium stuff be public (its bug tracker system now code.google.com is dead and its CI infra are all done by the Chrome infra team). I imagine to some limited degree it's true for WebKit (though I suspect they don't have anyone whose sole job is infra) given Apple don't have any general public bugtracker or CI system, and totally untrue for Edge.

astura 9y ago

However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.

markpapadakis 9y ago
On the flip-side though, the tools, expertise/skills and means for building browsers some 25+ years ago don't match what's available today.

roca 9y ago

There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be. And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you don't work in this area.

markpapadakis 9y ago
I never worked on a browser, though I did implement the HTML5 spec, twice, and I wrote a JS engine(compiler, runtime). I know that it was a lot easier because I could count on infromation and other advances that were available to me, and anyone else really, at the time, the kind of resources and information I probably wouildn't have had access to it("whats javascript?") 20+ years earlier. Browsers have evolved - because standards did, and expections along with them, but in the past they too were quite complex(see also Netscape's play: browsers, email, usenet client etc, suit) and again, it was harder then that it is nowadays to build such systems.
- roca 9y ago
  Which part of the HTML5 spec, though? A parser? Or the whole thing, including DOM APIs and all the features like media elements and so on? Even an HTML5 parser is harder than it looks to implement to the level needed for a browser. You have to build a proper DOM, you have to be secure against all kinds of fuzzing, you have to implement off-main-thread parsing and speculative readahead for performance, you have integrate it correctly the HTML5 event loop for document.write() etc, you have to support innerHTML and so on. Likewise building a JS engine is impressive, but I do not believe a Web-compatible competitive-performance JS engine can be built by any single person.
  - markpapadakis 9y ago
    The parser. Once for properly parsing HTML content, for a search engine, and the other for a framework used for saving pages (For an Instapaper like service). So it wasn't a big deal, but in both cases, a DOM was constructed and operations were executed against the DOM. Nothing about that or the JS engine is impressive really. That was my point, more or less. Of course, there's a difference between building something that works, and something that works exceptionally works etc etc(all the stuff on top of that), but all told, I still don't think building a browser justifies assembling such a huge org, even if there is no reliance on third-party technologies.
    - chrismorgan 9y ago
      Implementing an HTML parser is not hard—the spec is a book of instructions on what to do. Implementing a fast HTML parser that will produce a fast DOM is a little harder. Tying it in with a fast CSS engine is harder still. Tying it in with a JavaScript engine is a bit more work as well. Implementing layout is moderately fiendishly difficult to do and get right. And it just gets harder the more of the web platform you add, and the more it has to be fast.
    - roca 9y ago
      HTML5 parsing is maybe 1% of the HTML5 spec.
  - 9y ago
gsnedders 9y ago
> There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Scope differences make it incredibly hard. Plenty of people on the Blink team work on things like Skia, which neither the WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of (because they just leverage OS-specific APIs), or on their HTTP/TLS stack (again, neither WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of), etc. Gecko is somewhere in a middle-ground; they rely on third party libraries (including Skia—does that make that part of the Chrome team Blink/Gecko developers?) but not quite as much as WebKit and EdgeHTML do. Core web stuff? The Blink team is larger, yes, but by how much is a hard question. FWIW, I believe the Gecko team is nowadays larger than the EdgeHTML team, but they're certainly close in size. (And close to the size of the old Presto team, which admittedly had a scope closer to that of the Blink team.)
- Manishearth 9y ago
  Gecko also has its own infra/productivity/etc folks, whereas I bet these folks are from a much larger shared team at the big companies
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    The Chrome team has a lot of its own infra due to policy that a lot of Chromium stuff be public (its bug tracker system now code.google.com is dead and its CI infra are all done by the Chrome infra team). I imagine to some limited degree it's true for WebKit (though I suspect they don't have anyone whose sole job is infra) given Apple don't have any general public bugtracker or CI system, and totally untrue for Edge.