Browser Engines 2015: Commit Rates and Active Developer Counts (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ahh, I see. Thanks for responding.

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.