Google employs thousands of engineers who spend a majority of their time thinking about Google Chrome. This gets slightly more complicated because of, e.g., the strategic impact of Chrome in other places like ChromeOS. The right comparison would be Apple's WebKit and Safari teams.
to get one year's worth of commits as of today (as of rev c43e247d6444 to be exact), I get 1250. If I repeat that with "google.com" instead of "chromium.org", I get 623. So figure ~1800-1900 there.
I get 15. If I repeat that with apple.com instead of webkit.org I get 70. If I just list all distinct authors, I get 128. Note that this is an underestimate of what it takes to build a browser, because a bunch of the parts of an actual browser are not in the webkit repo itself last I checked. Like the whole network stack.
I get 359. I am quite sure this last is is an underestimate: I am a Mozilla employee, but I use a non-mozilla.com address in my commits, because I started contributing before becoming an employee. I'm not the only one. The total number of distinct committers there is 1497 which is a serious overestimate: web platform test changesets come with their original author, who is often an engineer working on some other browser. If I filter out webkit.org, microsoft.com, google.com, chromium.org, webkit.org, that leaves me with 1265. This is almost certainly a significant over-estimate, since it's more than the total number of Mozilla employees.
Note that we may be undercounting QA here, since not all of them might commit to the main repository.
On the other hand, we might be counting one-off contributors who are not really on the "browser team" per se, especially for "apple.com" and "google.com". We're also overcounting somewhat depending on how much churn there was over the course of the year (people leaving, new ones joining).
But pallpark, I suspect an unrealistic lower bound is 100 and a reasonable lower bound is 150-500, depending on how much of the tech stack you want to delegate to other entities. The Chrome team is a lot bigger than any of those numbers, of course.
With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not nearly a browser :(
> Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).
That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recollection Chromium embedding teams inside Google that are 30+ developers (again, let's forget managers, UX researchers, etc.). I know that there are at least 4 such teams at Google.
I would be very surprised if Google didn't have at least 1000 developers working on Chromium.
>With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Not so sure. I remember the Webkit guys being a very small team (and they basically did the whole of Safari). There was some such mention on Dave Hyatt's blog at some point.
And, as far as the "chrome" part (UI, settings, etc) goes, wasn't Firefox at first the work of a couple of people, who forked their own UI version of Mozilla? And still it got to be the most popular browser at the time.
Not to mention how whole OSes and other challenging things have been done by smaller teams...
> With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.
Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.
WebKit runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS across Intel and ARM architectures.
WebKit provides the web views for countless 3rd party apps, including Mail, Calendar, iTunes, etc.
Apple certainly has fewer people who get paid to write code for Safari/WebKit than Google has on Chrome/Blink. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla has more people too, especially since they’re rewriting pieces of the browser engine at the same time.
This list has 400 pages of contributors (~8000 people). Even with a very conservative assumption in that only 10% of them are full time developers, it's still 800. This doesn't even include other derivative projects and non engineers.
How big do you think the Chromium team is?