On the other hand, it's not like Firefox is the side project of a few of people in their spare time -- the Mozilla Foundation has annual revenue of over $400 million!
$400 million looks like a lot until you remember that Apple have $267 billion in cash reserves. The Mozilla Foundation's entire annual revenue isn't even a fifth of a percent of what Apple have just sitting around because they can't find a better use for it. The fact that Mozilla are able to punch even this far above their weight is kind of impressive.
But Mozilla really only has one big thing they make, which is Firefox. Apple's software portfolio on just one of their multiple hardware platforms (let's not forget that they make that hardware, too, including designing their own processors) completely dwarfs Mozilla.
I agree with jonas21 - for $400m a year you ought to be able to build an amazing browser.
1) Apple's cash assets aren't actually cash or just a bank account. It's accounting speak for liquid assets. Any investments that they could divest fairly quickly and easily and repurpose to finance other capital expenditures. The money isn't sitting around doing nothing; in the meantime it's invested in a safe portfolio which attempts to grow it. Imagine a hedge fund for just one LP.
2) Apple is a mega-company which has a bajillion lines of business and produces hardware. The WebKit team is a tiny tiny tiny sliver of what Apple does and cares about; so its budget is probably a lot closer to Mozilla's.
> The money isn't sitting around doing nothing; in the meantime it's invested in a safe portfolio which attempts to grow it. Imagine a hedge fund for just one LP.
Right... how does that make it any different?
Apple's not a finance company, or at least they weren't until they wound up with so much cash they had no actual present business needs for. If you're a hardware/software company that has so much extra money (billions) that you become your own 'hedge fund' to have something to do with it... yeah, you've got a lot of extra money. How much extra money? More than 500x the annual budget of Mozilla, yup.
I do not have an inside look, but if I remember correctly there were few calls about Mozilla losing focus on Firefox through making Firefox OS for a few years, which is exactly when the other vendors were reinventing their engines. They made some great work with Rust though (;
Firefox OS led Mozilla to push a lot on the performance front in Gecko, mostly in gfx land. The JS perf is mostly SpiderMonkey and there was very little FxOS specific work done (as far as I remember, we mostly got help to tune the GC heuristics) because the JS team was already streched pretty thin.
These days Moco doesn't even try on mobile anymore (hint, there is no performance testing at all on arm in https://arewefastyet.com/#).
The desktop Firefox front-end didn't evolve so much during the FxOS days but these was not the same team either... and you would notice that key people leading Fx front end have changed since.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation