Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller.
I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:
It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
> Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
> Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
I think this is a false dichotomy; the huge resources are what allowed them to hire all of those experts.
Actually, at $100k/yr per team member even Mozilla could afford such a team several times over. At least one if several of them of talent level nostrademons described were made ridiculous-good offers. :)
It appears it was management and/or politics that stopped other companies from doing what Google did.
Mozilla had around $7-8 million in profit last I looked. Currently over $9 million. They could still afford them at $250k each. Such a project would've even been worth most or all of a year's profit. Fortunately, they're doing Quantum to improve things. :)
Revenue is the important number to look at - Wikipedia has it at $329.5M as of 2014. Profit is after salaries - when all the early Firefox people left, they were replaced by other programmers, who probably cost a bit less but not a whole lot. I think tsunamifury's estimate of $500K-1M minimum isn't out of line, but even then, a team of 20 people making $1M fully-loaded costs $20M, which isn't exorbitant. Mozilla's revenue was estimated at $57M in 2006.
Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet."
I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.
You can start by letting them do their jobs. From TFA:
"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."
The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.
If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.
It's really not clear to me what definition of "reorg" is being used here, given those dates. The only one that might plausibly fit is "any change in the management structure, anywhere in the organization" to give you that frequency. As in, to get this frequency you have to count "a manager has too many reports, so another one was hired to take part of the load" as a "reorg".
That's fair, though it does seem like a fair number of people at Mozilla don't actually know what their reporting chain is nowadays yet alone who needs to approve any expense.
I'm not sure why people wouldn't know their reporting chain. It's in the company "phonebook": search for yourself, then follow the "Manager" links...
Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.
All I can say is that this is not universal. My colleagues in Research and I have been able to pursue longer-term research directions at Mozilla that are now successful and which, frankly, most other companies would have shut down long ago for not having enough short-term value.
Yes, it's from the part of TFA article about developing IoT devices. Also in TFA is the author describing their time working on Firefox Mobile and later Firefox OS in glowing terms.
The Chrome team wasn't that big (though not that small either, in the grand scheme of things), but the marketing spend on Chrome was massive. Way more than Mozilla could ever have afforded for Firefox.
And for a number of years now, Chrome has had both a huge team _and_ huge marketing spend.
Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.