Indeed, and one can surely maintain Firefox 1 or 2 easily with a bunch of volunteers.
But maintaining a whole OS with a whole virtualization layer, a whole sandbox system, several supported scripting systems, its own scheduler, its own graphics stack, and support for compatibility with any bug a competing system has?
Modern browser are reaching complexities we’ve only seen in whole operating systems before. You don’t see a bunch of volunteers maintain everything from Linux to KDE at once, it’s hundredthousands of people working in a very different way.
To be able to compete against Google, be able to force them to implement features you pioneer, and force them to avoid implementing other features, to be able to keep up with them and reach better security than them, the current Firefox team is not enough.
But maintaining a whole OS with a whole virtualization layer, a whole sandbox system, several supported scripting systems, its own scheduler, its own graphics stack, and support for compatibility with any bug a competing system has?
Modern browser are reaching complexities we’ve only seen in whole operating systems before. You don’t see a bunch of volunteers maintain everything from Linux to KDE at once, it’s hundredthousands of people working in a very different way.
To be able to compete against Google, be able to force them to implement features you pioneer, and force them to avoid implementing other features, to be able to keep up with them and reach better security than them, the current Firefox team is not enough.