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Mozilla has a revenue stream of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Most of it comes from partnerships with the search engines. Non-profit just means that making money is not their primary goal but it is one the important goals in order to make them self sufficient and enable them to work towards their true goals.

http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/whats-firefox-wo...




This is something that has bewildered me -- Where does all that money go!?

I understand it is not cheap to hire developers but it just seems really weird that the Mozilla foundation has had over a billion dollars flow through it and all they have to show for it is a web browser (and other software).


The overwhelming majority of revenue coming into Mozilla goes to paying staff. Mozilla has just over 1,000 employees.


To continue the GP's point... What do all those employees do?


Add code to Firefox.


You might be right. According to openhub Firefox had 1121 contributors last year. Compared to that Chromium had 1919 contributors. Not all of them work for Mozilla and Google respectively and not all employees commit to the code base...


> Add code to Firefox.

They just seem to be not very good at it, because from 40 -> 50 - memory usage is much worse than previous versions (Yes, I know switching to the MP model has to do with it, but if your architectural changes hurt usability for security I consider that quite poor), the developer tools are still trash, and performance is still worse than chrome.


> the developer tools are still trash

I quite like the Firefox devtools, but you may be happy to know that brand-new, rewritten devtools are currently coming down the pipeline.

There's also WebReplay, a time-traveling debugger for JS and the rest of the browser, which is a bit longer off but is absolutely amazing (I've seen a demonstration): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...


> Yes, I know switching to the MP model has to do with it, but if your architectural changes hurt usability for security I consider that quite poor

Since you consider that "quite poor", can you share your proposed method for doing multiprocess without regressing memory usage?


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