Considering that, it's quite amazing that Mozilla is capable of not just making a browser, but also an email client, with a budget of 500 million.
They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. Other major expenses were $66 million for marketing (yay Moz://a!), $72 million for the dubious "general and administrative" category, a few million here and there for other things, and the rest went into the $500 million nest egg.
So they could certainly spend a lot more on Firefox if needed, but it's not evident to me that Firefox's weaknesses are money related.
I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period.
* Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.fxos/FoAwi...)
* They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. (https://monitor.firefox.com/)
* They were building a file-sharing service (https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)
* They were building a new VR-first browser and content aggregator (https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now...)
Wasn't HIBP a single person.
So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team?
Looking at the Send github (https://github.com/mozilla/send/graphs/contributors) it's essentially 2 people, about 1.5 person years in the commits.
The first and fourth items you list sound like absolute white elephants that management should have allowed only as "we'll give you a full time dev wage for it and spare facilities, show us what you can do and we might take it on".
So, what have we got left $240M?
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-and-administrat...
Doesn't sound 'dubious' to me.
And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million budget goes. They're not rewriting the entire thing every year.
Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.
I think my point is still valid, that Microsoft hasn't given up on their browser, just most of the technology underlying it - which their users don't care about. The fact that Edge is a pretty decent epub reader (for now... https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/2...) isn't necessarily tied to the fact that it's EdgeHTML based. If they wanted to, Microsoft could implement the same feature set on top of Chromium.
