14 ms·

An Update on MDN Web Docs

361 points by weinzierl 6y ago

tehbeard 6y ago
> The core engineering team will continue to run the MDN site So is that basically saying we're adding more work to a probably demoralized and overworked team? My knowledge of Mozilla's internal hierarchy is admittedly quite sparse, what's the ratio of "beancounter" to "bread maker" with the recent cuts?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ysavir 6y ago
  > So is that basically saying we're adding more work to a probably demoralized and overworked team? I don't think this changes their workload. The core engineering team is likely already responsible for technical improvements to and maintaining MDN.
  - kinlan 6y ago
    Its: as I understand it that's it's now just two engineers and one tech writer.
- freshsqueeze 6y ago
  The bread makers follow whatever the beancounters say.
- banachtarski 6y ago
  From a friend, post layoffs there are some good people left but also lots of grifters/dead-weight, especially in the upper echelons (not referring to engineering specifically)
picodguyo 6y ago
Sounds like they are leaving the site up but not writing new content? That could actually be worse than just taking the site down as it will quickly grow outdated.
- awinograd 6y ago
  > We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. We are continuing our planned platform improvements, including a GitHub-based submission system for contributors. Looks like they won't write new content themselves, but will have a system for keeping content up to date
  - picodguyo 6y ago
    A defunded part of the organization "working on a plan". Does not sound super promising.
    - kinlan 6y ago
      All the members of the PAB are working with Mozilla to support them in the long term. We believed it's a shared responsibility to ensure that the web platform is documented well.
- unilynx 6y ago
  Taking it down would leave us with w3schools, arguably a lot worse situation than letting the current MDN grow stale..
  - rezonant 6y ago
    Incidentally, I bet a lot of us would pay to have w3schools taken down
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
      Why? In recent years w3schools has been a valuable resource...
  - rikroots 6y ago
    > Taking it down would leave us with w3schools I've long avoided w3schools, but a lot of comments on various HN threads suggest the site has improved a lot over the past few years. If true, this makes me less worried about the future of MDN. Plus there's other reference sites I find myself using from time to time, for instance Can I Use[1] (which has a Patreon) and QuirksMode[2] (supported by donations). Monocultures, in my view, are not good for the environment - and that includes coding reference sites. [1] - https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ [2] - https://www.quirksmode.org/ https://www.quirksmode.org/
ChrisSD 6y ago
Note that MDN is a collaborative site. The members of the MDN Product Advisory Board[0] gives an idea of the organisations involved in maintaining it. It's bigger than Mozilla. See also the 2017 announcement[1]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Advisory_Board/Members https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Adv... [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr...
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Interesting. So, should a new API standard emerge, it sounds like we can still expect MDN to reflect that in its docs as it has in the past?
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    Anyone can contribute. A big part of Mozilla's job is maintaining and improving the tools and process to do so. That said, I wouldn't want to downplay the contributions to the text made by Mozilla.
ggoo 6y ago
This is sad to see.
zelly 6y ago
Does anyone know why the favicon for this site is the emblem of the PLA and the Red Army?
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  It's because the PLA stole the Mozilla logo. Source: I'm Chinese.
- cxr 6y ago
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
  - splatcollision 6y ago
    Bonus points for linking to jwz from hacker news!
  - qilo 6y ago
    https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they...
  - phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
    The first time I saw Crash Worship, I thought they might sacrifice me to whatever horrible god they were following. When they didn't, I never missed them when they came back through town. I miss that band so much
  - bob1029 6y ago
    Please note that this link's content was apparently replaced with offensive imagery.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      That happens any time jwz is linked from HN. You have to strip the referrer or else you get that image.
Santosh83 6y ago
Who will add updated content without the tech writers? It is probably too much to expect the core engineering team to also double as the doc writing team in the longer term. Sounds like they're planning to basically hand MDN over to either an independent foundation or consortium setup just for it, or let MS/Google take stewardship (Apple prominently but perhaps unsurprisingly missing from the Advisory board)... Whatever happens I hope the docs are not left to languish outdated and progressively less useful. MDN is literally the wikipedia for web developers. I also don't see why efforts can't be made to monetise the site with contextual ads. Hosting reasonable ads is better than simply dying off for lack of self sufficiency. If the issue is because of ties to the non-profit foundation then changes can be made...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kinlan 6y ago
  My team (Chrome DevRel) is a member of the PAB, I'm looking forward to this week's notes being released in public. We're looking at many options to help secure the future for MDN with Mozilla. In terms of who will add content, we still have our tech writers contributing. But the current volume of content across the site will be lower. My personal opinion is that whilst MDN has an amazing community of people who write for it, it needs a permanent staff to ensure the reference materials are suitable for developers. I want our team to work out how we can get back to having a permanent staff to support MDN and have that staff be agnostic to browser vendors.
codezero 6y ago
I wish a wealthy SV person would just buy up Mozilla and get rid of its leadership, how many times have we heard how bad it is?
- ryanianian 6y ago
  And ruin any semblance of autonomy and not being beholden to the whims of the same kinds of people who add undeletable apps and spyware to new phones and laptops?
  - tasogare 6y ago
    How is Mozilla financially autonomous from Google?
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    The following is my personal impression of the situation, which I base on following everything Mozilla closely for almost as long as it existed, particularly closely in the most recent years. I also have seen both Baker and Surman speak - as well as Eich and Beard many others of note - both in public talks but also in smaller, more private conversations. And I saw a lot of internal mozilla discussion over the years and talked to quite a few people. While I was active in the mozilla project for some time, I have never been on their payroll, neither as an employee or contractor. Right now mozilla is very much beholden to the whims of the their CEO and has been for a while (when interim-CEO and before that when Mozilla Foundation chairwoman). Baker - additionally to being the current CEO of the Corporation - chairs the board of directors of both, the Foundation and the Corporation. The current Mozilla Foundation president, Surman, is her long-time yes-man, as well. Chris Beard, former CEO taking reign after Eich's departure - was a Baker yes-man as well. She managed to surround herself with an army of yes-people. She effectively is a "(benevolent) dictator" like a SV billionaire would be, except the billionaire probably wouldn't spend so much mozilla money on themself and their cronies. To be fair, Baker played an instrumental role in getting Netscape to release the initial code and setting up the Foundation, and was a good steward of the Foundation for a long time. She played a bit of a role in what started the downfall of mozilla (peaking at burning stacks on money on FirefoxOS; tho some good work came out of it that, it's still a huge net negative), but it was mostly other people who were a little bit... too enthusiastic about what mozilla can achieve, spreading resources thin. After the failure of FirefoxOS, mozilla leadership got scared and clueless what to do next, and looked for Baker to provide leadership. But Baker lacks the "product" vision (Firefox had to come from other people as a hobby project, even FirefoxOS started out that way), is more interested in pet projects and dominating them. E.g. the way the CoC was handled; I am not saying a CoC in itself is bad, but the way it was handled and communicated caused major rifts between the leadership and the volunteers, leading to a lot of especially the most experienced "valuable" volunteers shrugging and resigning and changing focus to other projects. The Eich (and gerv) situation - which wasn't helped by Baker, to say it politely - furthermore created a talent vacuum at the top of the Corporation, and eventually was "resolved" by filing it with unsuited candidates - specifically Baker's yes-man Chris Beard, who was too much of a marketing guy and figurehead to be an effective leader in the CEO role. (I am not commenting on, analyzing or defending Eich's reasons for donating to Prop 8, which made same-sex marriages illegal in California until it was reversed by a court later) Since the ousting of Eich, and even a little before that, it appears to me, the culture turned from a more or less productive "togetherness" (with it's share of clashes, of course) to an outright cold war between the Baker camp and many of the actual tech staff (and few remaining tech-centered managers). A lot of very good, very idealistic "true believer" people lost their faith and took the golden parachute to the FAANGS, something I would have never expected from a lot of them a few years earlier. Of course, priorities and opinions shift over the course of a life, and not everybody who left did so because of the situation at mozilla - some surely did to seek new challenges or advance their career - but it's still staggering to see the exodus of long-time believers, employees and volunteers alike, over the least 5 or so years. I remember sitting in the audience of the 2013 mozilla summit (Eich hadn't left mozilla yet, of course) and seeing the constant stream of the leadership talk about "changing the world", "1 million mozillians", proclaiming how "FirefoxOS and BrowserID" will empower users, and all that moonshooting marketing stuff. I distinctly remember the negative impression Baker and Pete Scanlon left me with. And I remember the extreme overuse of the word "Awesome". I remember looking left and right to my fellow (mostly volunteer) pals, looking as confused as me, and that one Baker-friend (forgot her name) sitting rather close to us in the audience, constantly whooing and howling in approval. I remember talking to a lot of (new to me) people from all things mozilla during the summit, and most everybody was as confused as me, and far from being as excited and optimistic as the leadership had been, and very skeptical about the use of resources and leadership priorities. It was not my first big mozilla event, but it was the first one which had a Kafkaesque "corporate" "management decided" feel to it, instead of a community networking event of a diverse community working towards a common goal.
javajosh 6y ago
Man, of all the things Mozilla produces I would argue MDN is their most valuable product - as in, if the money really ran out, this should be the last thing to go. I get cutting the other developer outreach programs, they seem like a luxury, but MDN is like wikipedia for browser devs. It's totally indispensable.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  It may be valuable as a public good, but what's the ROI for Mozilla? Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access?
  - ramadis 6y ago
    > Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access? I'd argue that people would pay for MDN. I know I would pay a small fee for so high-quality straight forward information on web APIs.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    If you consider Mozilla as merely a for-profit business, no. If you consider Mozilla's mission statement, the ROI is absolutely through the roof. "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > It may be valuable as a public good, but what's the ROI for Mozilla? Isn't it the whooooole point of Mozilla that it creates public good for the internet?
  - acdha 6y ago
    I’d be curious whether they could make the Wikipedia model work, especially with corporate donations. I’d personally pay just as I do for Read The Docs but it takes a bunch of people to match a single company’s small change funding.
  - 6y ago
itwy 6y ago
They mention "MDN tech writing" as the last item how ridiculous. I just dropped Firefox. My way of punishing Mozilla for this stupid decision.
rammy1234 6y ago
They need to make MDN a paid site for developers. Can work with organizations to get access to MDN content. They can accept donations or a small yearly fees. If organizations can sponser can also contribute will be a nice addition so it can keep fees minimal to individual developers
- Avtomatk 6y ago
  I totally disagree with making MDN a paid site ... Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous .... MDN should be kept open to contributions and donations but putting up a paywall only makes things worse for all of science in general.
  - rammy1234 6y ago
    me too but how else we can save it from going stale. Even science research needs funding. If orgs can donate as benefit of its employee. If not its up to individuals
  - Permit 6y ago
    > Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous No. Developers are supposed to pay to access the hard work of the technical writers and developers who maintain MDN. I don't understand why you think it's self-evident that this work should be free. Here is a longer explanation by the person who created the precursor to MDN: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_or_t.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_... Here is the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - kinlan 6y ago
      The W3C has many wealthy companies as participants, they should support it more too given that each and everyone benefits from MDN being the central place for all browser API reference. I lead of Chrome DevRel team and we contribute with tech writer support and work on the PAB, it appears too little still but there are many web standards aligned companies that could provide more support because they directly benefit from MDNs existence.
ary 6y ago
> The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing. > We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. The stated rationale for the "re-org" (read, layoffs) was to shore up the financials and explore new revenue opportunities. Here is a novel idea that I will provide at no cost: Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for. Market validation you say? People won't pay for documentation you say? The sole developer of the macOS app Dash[1] makes a fairly decent living selling an app that merely allows you to search freely available documentation offline. MDN has real value that people, myself included, will pay for. Just this week I have referred to MDN documentation at least a couple of hundred times. Charge. Money. For. MDN. And pay the tech writers. [1] https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash Edit: wording correction.
- kissgyorgy 6y ago
  This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.
  - eli 6y ago
    You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.
  - dflock 6y ago
    I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
Arubis 6y ago
A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems. Most of the time this feels like myopic hero-worship ("why doesn't Zuck just fix free speech?"). In this case, though, that would actually be _relevant_. Individuals or businesses with excess wealth that build value using the web would be well justified in working with MDN to ensure these docs stay alive and fresh.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  > A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems Love how you creatively defined this concept. This is a recurring pattern i´ve seen particularly in tech, and its not just over billionaires.. In psychoanalysis theres this great lacanian concept of "Big Other". Once i understood this concept better, its much easier to spot my own flaws on counting on the Big Other (that is actually some illusory tendency of our minds to give us some comfort and help us to cope with the brutal reality). You can see a great fictional tale about this concept embodied in "The Wizard of Oz". Once we understand that the big other we were always counting on is in fact pretty much "smoke and mirrors", and that the big other (unlike in the wizard tale) doesnt really care, its a sour wake up call, but one that makes you grow up a little. And if you not only believe in Big Others, but also assume they have a good willing nature, especially the ones that followed a road paved with gold, i have a bridge to sell to you..
cft 6y ago
This corporate "moving forward" newspeak sounds ominous.
- freshsqueeze 6y ago
  Their layoff post began with "fighting systemic racism" and the coronavirus and the future of the Internet or something completely irrelevant.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
I wouldn't think twice about paying $20/mo for MDN. My employer would probably even reimburse it. Same goes for Firefox's dev tools. They have some great features that Chrome doesn't.
gilrain 6y ago
An interesting solution could be to make MDN a paid site, as many suggest, but also offer it to libraries and universities for a token fee. The process is already in place and successful for scientific journals and encyclopedias, so the friction should be low. Then, the paid version would be the most convenient and attractive to anyone with $5 a month to spare, but everyone else could get access through the nearest library or university, a one-time hassle with equivalent access after. As a bonus it raises awareness and usage of libraries, which is good for everyone.
aerovistae 6y ago
This is a sad post. The MDN web docs are the internet handbook for javascript, html, and css, besides other browser technologies. this needs to be enshrined and freed of financial constraint. we are kind of failing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
spurgu 6y ago
What a fucking croc of inter-corporate motherfucking bullshit.
spurgu 6y ago
> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. So fucking work out that plan before this announcement. Corporate culture makes me wanna vomit.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  That's not really feasible. For very obvious reasons you can't tell every employee in a company "we're going to have to fire loads of you in a couple of months; please work out a plan to deal with that".
jacekm 6y ago
I think it would be ok if they were charging for _some_ of the content. Docs could stay free and they could charge for development courses. They could even make introductory courses free and charge only for advanced topics. Another example - browser compatibility matrices. They could be free just for the current versions of browsers and you'd have to pay for historical and future (i.e. development versions) data. I think it's possible to find a balance between making the essential knowledge free so newcomers can join the industry and charging those who already have a source of income. I know that 5$/month can still be too much in some parts of the world, but this could be addressed with regional pricing.
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  Yes, "freemium" -- that is the way. Another piece of content that could be premium at are the examples. Professional editors are necessary, to impose structure and standards, but as Stack overflow shows, technical knowledge contributions can be gotten for free with a bit of gamification.
zaphirplane 6y ago
One thing that surprised me was naming the CEO as co-founder.
freshsqueeze 6y ago
Google and Microsoft can just take over. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals from Google, at least they have a lot of experience building valuable user-facing at-scale sites. Microsoft has done more relevant open source and developer stuff in the last half decade.
- kinlan 6y ago
  Chrome DevRel lead here. We don't want that. We want to support MDN and for it to remain browser agnostic.
bosswipe 6y ago
The still unknown mystery is why the layoffs were necessary when Google signed the same contract that they have signed before. Mozilla corp-speak is so undecipherable that they leave a wake of panicked confusion with every one of these posts.
anotherevan 6y ago
https://patchfriday.com/92/ https://patchfriday.com/92/
dflock 6y ago
There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
- rochak 6y ago
  I’ll get some merch. Thanks!
- freshqueeze 6y ago
  I bet these pay for an exec's Tesla.
  - sebazzz 6y ago
    That is also true for any non-profit you donate for. The Cancer non-profit, the Xyz decease non-profit. That is not strange. Non-profits require good leadership - and that comes with a salary.
- JaggedJax 6y ago
  Despite all the people in this thread saying they would happily donate directly to MDN, no one has responded here noticing that the donation page doesn't work.
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    There's a discussion up the page.
- kinlan 6y ago
  And also implementors of the web specs and APIs (browsers and others) imo should fund it more effectively (disclosure, I lead Chrome Developer Relations).
aikah 6y ago
Google and Microsoft? You want to look good after all the stuff you pulled lately? Hire MDN maintainers and host MDN. Easy karma.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  Google is slowly trying to supplant that with https://web.dev/ https://web.dev/ They couldn't care less if MDN lived, and would be quite happy if MDN (and Mozilla) died, no one would challenge them on standards and technologies etc.
  - esperent 6y ago
    Antitrust laws might.
  - HJain13 6y ago
    MDN and web.dev play completely different roles for now. Also MDN doesn't factor in challenging Google for web standards and technologies, Firefox team might but MDN definitely doesn't
  - kinlan 6y ago
    As the owner of web.dev we're absolutely not doing that. We're working with Mozilla and the PAB right now on what's need to support the future of MDN.
    - kinlan 6y ago
      To add, we already contribute a lot to MDN.
    - flingo 6y ago
      How did you find this comment?
- heisenbit 6y ago
  Do we need more concentration of power? Let‘s avoid for as long as we can manage.
computerex 6y ago
Mozilla is digging its own grave.
gregors 6y ago
Having to pay for documentation to build on your platform would seem like yet one more road block to having people use your platform.
breezest 6y ago
Isn't it better for Mozilla to "sell" some projects to other tech or foundations rather than keeping them internally and let them wither away?
andrew_ 6y ago
Mozilla putting a hold on DevRel investment is an industry bellwether. I'd be concerned if I held that position in tech.
- kinlan 6y ago
  Biased opinion. It depends if you've articulated the value of the function well. I do fear that if it's seen as a marketing function then it's an easy place to start tightening belts. If it's integrated into the product team then it's harder, imo.
coldtea 6y ago
>Our Co-Founder and CEO Mitchell Baker outlines the reasons why here. Why is that lawyer still there after 20 years of terrible decisions?
alwahi 6y ago
f
charlieflowers 6y ago
Maybe MDN should launch a KickStarter every year: "OK, we're up for annual renewal. If we meet our goal of $xx,xxx, MDN will stay around for another year. If not, we'll shut down our offices, lay off our staff, and just publish a static mirror of the current content."
Rastonbury 6y ago
Is basically a wiki right? Anyone can contribute? What proportion is written by paid staff and what proportion is written by public contributors? It seems like it suffers from a free rider problem which isn't at all helped by the lack of focus (and funds) in Mozilla's initiatives. I understand that people are sick of corporate greed, out-of-touch execs, etc but I don't blame Mozilla for deprioritizing it when they literally are running out of money to pay staff (this is a whole other issue in and of itself). It should be spun out with formalised its goals then go full wikipedia with annual fundraising or donation drives. If this fails they should look to be subsumed under similar non-profit foundations who can afford to maintain it. The free rider problem is not easily solved and if it isn't I expect MDN to decay, there isn't away around this.

361 points by weinzierl 6y ago

> The core engineering team will continue to run the MDN site So is that basically saying we're adding more work to a probably demoralized and overworked team? My knowledge of Mozilla's internal hierarchy is admittedly quite sparse, what's the ratio of "beancounter" to "bread maker" with the recent cuts?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ysavir 6y ago
> So is that basically saying we're adding more work to a probably demoralized and overworked team? I don't think this changes their workload. The core engineering team is likely already responsible for technical improvements to and maintaining MDN.
- kinlan 6y ago
  Its: as I understand it that's it's now just two engineers and one tech writer.
freshsqueeze 6y ago
The bread makers follow whatever the beancounters say.
banachtarski 6y ago
From a friend, post layoffs there are some good people left but also lots of grifters/dead-weight, especially in the upper echelons (not referring to engineering specifically)

picodguyo 6y ago

Sounds like they are leaving the site up but not writing new content? That could actually be worse than just taking the site down as it will quickly grow outdated.

awinograd 6y ago
> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. We are continuing our planned platform improvements, including a GitHub-based submission system for contributors. Looks like they won't write new content themselves, but will have a system for keeping content up to date
- picodguyo 6y ago
  A defunded part of the organization "working on a plan". Does not sound super promising.
  - kinlan 6y ago
    All the members of the PAB are working with Mozilla to support them in the long term. We believed it's a shared responsibility to ensure that the web platform is documented well.
unilynx 6y ago
Taking it down would leave us with w3schools, arguably a lot worse situation than letting the current MDN grow stale..
- rezonant 6y ago
  Incidentally, I bet a lot of us would pay to have w3schools taken down
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    Why? In recent years w3schools has been a valuable resource...
- rikroots 6y ago
  > Taking it down would leave us with w3schools I've long avoided w3schools, but a lot of comments on various HN threads suggest the site has improved a lot over the past few years. If true, this makes me less worried about the future of MDN. Plus there's other reference sites I find myself using from time to time, for instance Can I Use[1] (which has a Patreon) and QuirksMode[2] (supported by donations). Monocultures, in my view, are not good for the environment - and that includes coding reference sites. [1] - https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ [2] - https://www.quirksmode.org/ https://www.quirksmode.org/

ChrisSD 6y ago

Note that MDN is a collaborative site. The members of the MDN Product Advisory Board[0] gives an idea of the organisations involved in maintaining it. It's bigger than Mozilla. See also the 2017 announcement[1]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Advisory_Board/Members https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/MDN_Product_Adv... [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-microsoft-google-w3c-samsung-together-create-cross-browser-documentation-mdn/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/18/mozilla-brings-micr...

themodelplumber 6y ago
Interesting. So, should a new API standard emerge, it sounds like we can still expect MDN to reflect that in its docs as it has in the past?
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Anyone can contribute. A big part of Mozilla's job is maintaining and improving the tools and process to do so. That said, I wouldn't want to downplay the contributions to the text made by Mozilla.

ggoo 6y ago

This is sad to see.

zelly 6y ago

Does anyone know why the favicon for this site is the emblem of the PLA and the Red Army?

FooBarWidget 6y ago
It's because the PLA stole the Mozilla logo. Source: I'm Chinese.
cxr 6y ago
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
- splatcollision 6y ago
  Bonus points for linking to jwz from hacker news!
- qilo 6y ago
  https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/ https://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they...
- phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
  The first time I saw Crash Worship, I thought they might sacrifice me to whatever horrible god they were following. When they didn't, I never missed them when they came back through town. I miss that band so much
- bob1029 6y ago
  Please note that this link's content was apparently replaced with offensive imagery.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    That happens any time jwz is linked from HN. You have to strip the referrer or else you get that image.

Santosh83 6y ago

Who will add updated content without the tech writers? It is probably too much to expect the core engineering team to also double as the doc writing team in the longer term. Sounds like they're planning to basically hand MDN over to either an independent foundation or consortium setup just for it, or let MS/Google take stewardship (Apple prominently but perhaps unsurprisingly missing from the Advisory board)... Whatever happens I hope the docs are not left to languish outdated and progressively less useful. MDN is literally the wikipedia for web developers. I also don't see why efforts can't be made to monetise the site with contextual ads. Hosting reasonable ads is better than simply dying off for lack of self sufficiency. If the issue is because of ties to the non-profit foundation then changes can be made...

deleted 6y ago
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kinlan 6y ago
My team (Chrome DevRel) is a member of the PAB, I'm looking forward to this week's notes being released in public. We're looking at many options to help secure the future for MDN with Mozilla. In terms of who will add content, we still have our tech writers contributing. But the current volume of content across the site will be lower. My personal opinion is that whilst MDN has an amazing community of people who write for it, it needs a permanent staff to ensure the reference materials are suitable for developers. I want our team to work out how we can get back to having a permanent staff to support MDN and have that staff be agnostic to browser vendors.

codezero 6y ago

I wish a wealthy SV person would just buy up Mozilla and get rid of its leadership, how many times have we heard how bad it is?

ryanianian 6y ago
And ruin any semblance of autonomy and not being beholden to the whims of the same kinds of people who add undeletable apps and spyware to new phones and laptops?
- tasogare 6y ago
  How is Mozilla financially autonomous from Google?
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  The following is my personal impression of the situation, which I base on following everything Mozilla closely for almost as long as it existed, particularly closely in the most recent years. I also have seen both Baker and Surman speak - as well as Eich and Beard many others of note - both in public talks but also in smaller, more private conversations. And I saw a lot of internal mozilla discussion over the years and talked to quite a few people. While I was active in the mozilla project for some time, I have never been on their payroll, neither as an employee or contractor. Right now mozilla is very much beholden to the whims of the their CEO and has been for a while (when interim-CEO and before that when Mozilla Foundation chairwoman). Baker - additionally to being the current CEO of the Corporation - chairs the board of directors of both, the Foundation and the Corporation. The current Mozilla Foundation president, Surman, is her long-time yes-man, as well. Chris Beard, former CEO taking reign after Eich's departure - was a Baker yes-man as well. She managed to surround herself with an army of yes-people. She effectively is a "(benevolent) dictator" like a SV billionaire would be, except the billionaire probably wouldn't spend so much mozilla money on themself and their cronies. To be fair, Baker played an instrumental role in getting Netscape to release the initial code and setting up the Foundation, and was a good steward of the Foundation for a long time. She played a bit of a role in what started the downfall of mozilla (peaking at burning stacks on money on FirefoxOS; tho some good work came out of it that, it's still a huge net negative), but it was mostly other people who were a little bit... too enthusiastic about what mozilla can achieve, spreading resources thin. After the failure of FirefoxOS, mozilla leadership got scared and clueless what to do next, and looked for Baker to provide leadership. But Baker lacks the "product" vision (Firefox had to come from other people as a hobby project, even FirefoxOS started out that way), is more interested in pet projects and dominating them. E.g. the way the CoC was handled; I am not saying a CoC in itself is bad, but the way it was handled and communicated caused major rifts between the leadership and the volunteers, leading to a lot of especially the most experienced "valuable" volunteers shrugging and resigning and changing focus to other projects. The Eich (and gerv) situation - which wasn't helped by Baker, to say it politely - furthermore created a talent vacuum at the top of the Corporation, and eventually was "resolved" by filing it with unsuited candidates - specifically Baker's yes-man Chris Beard, who was too much of a marketing guy and figurehead to be an effective leader in the CEO role. (I am not commenting on, analyzing or defending Eich's reasons for donating to Prop 8, which made same-sex marriages illegal in California until it was reversed by a court later) Since the ousting of Eich, and even a little before that, it appears to me, the culture turned from a more or less productive "togetherness" (with it's share of clashes, of course) to an outright cold war between the Baker camp and many of the actual tech staff (and few remaining tech-centered managers). A lot of very good, very idealistic "true believer" people lost their faith and took the golden parachute to the FAANGS, something I would have never expected from a lot of them a few years earlier. Of course, priorities and opinions shift over the course of a life, and not everybody who left did so because of the situation at mozilla - some surely did to seek new challenges or advance their career - but it's still staggering to see the exodus of long-time believers, employees and volunteers alike, over the least 5 or so years. I remember sitting in the audience of the 2013 mozilla summit (Eich hadn't left mozilla yet, of course) and seeing the constant stream of the leadership talk about "changing the world", "1 million mozillians", proclaiming how "FirefoxOS and BrowserID" will empower users, and all that moonshooting marketing stuff. I distinctly remember the negative impression Baker and Pete Scanlon left me with. And I remember the extreme overuse of the word "Awesome". I remember looking left and right to my fellow (mostly volunteer) pals, looking as confused as me, and that one Baker-friend (forgot her name) sitting rather close to us in the audience, constantly whooing and howling in approval. I remember talking to a lot of (new to me) people from all things mozilla during the summit, and most everybody was as confused as me, and far from being as excited and optimistic as the leadership had been, and very skeptical about the use of resources and leadership priorities. It was not my first big mozilla event, but it was the first one which had a Kafkaesque "corporate" "management decided" feel to it, instead of a community networking event of a diverse community working towards a common goal.

javajosh 6y ago

Man, of all the things Mozilla produces I would argue MDN is their most valuable product - as in, if the money really ran out, this should be the last thing to go. I get cutting the other developer outreach programs, they seem like a luxury, but MDN is like wikipedia for browser devs. It's totally indispensable.

bdcravens 6y ago
It may be valuable as a public good, but what's the ROI for Mozilla? Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access?
- ramadis 6y ago
  > Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access? I'd argue that people would pay for MDN. I know I would pay a small fee for so high-quality straight forward information on web APIs.
- falcolas 6y ago
  If you consider Mozilla as merely a for-profit business, no. If you consider Mozilla's mission statement, the ROI is absolutely through the roof. "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > It may be valuable as a public good, but what's the ROI for Mozilla? Isn't it the whooooole point of Mozilla that it creates public good for the internet?
- acdha 6y ago
  I’d be curious whether they could make the Wikipedia model work, especially with corporate donations. I’d personally pay just as I do for Read The Docs but it takes a bunch of people to match a single company’s small change funding.
- 6y ago

itwy 6y ago

They mention "MDN tech writing" as the last item how ridiculous. I just dropped Firefox. My way of punishing Mozilla for this stupid decision.

rammy1234 6y ago

They need to make MDN a paid site for developers. Can work with organizations to get access to MDN content. They can accept donations or a small yearly fees. If organizations can sponser can also contribute will be a nice addition so it can keep fees minimal to individual developers

Avtomatk 6y ago
I totally disagree with making MDN a paid site ... Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous .... MDN should be kept open to contributions and donations but putting up a paywall only makes things worse for all of science in general.
- rammy1234 6y ago
  me too but how else we can save it from going stale. Even science research needs funding. If orgs can donate as benefit of its employee. If not its up to individuals
- Permit 6y ago
  > Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous No. Developers are supposed to pay to access the hard work of the technical writers and developers who maintain MDN. I don't understand why you think it's self-evident that this work should be free. Here is a longer explanation by the person who created the precursor to MDN: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_or_t.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_... Here is the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kinlan 6y ago
    The W3C has many wealthy companies as participants, they should support it more too given that each and everyone benefits from MDN being the central place for all browser API reference. I lead of Chrome DevRel team and we contribute with tech writer support and work on the PAB, it appears too little still but there are many web standards aligned companies that could provide more support because they directly benefit from MDNs existence.

ary 6y ago

> The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing. > We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. The stated rationale for the "re-org" (read, layoffs) was to shore up the financials and explore new revenue opportunities. Here is a novel idea that I will provide at no cost: Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for. Market validation you say? People won't pay for documentation you say? The sole developer of the macOS app Dash[1] makes a fairly decent living selling an app that merely allows you to search freely available documentation offline. MDN has real value that people, myself included, will pay for. Just this week I have referred to MDN documentation at least a couple of hundred times. Charge. Money. For. MDN. And pay the tech writers. [1] https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash Edit: wording correction.

kissgyorgy 6y ago
This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.
- eli 6y ago
  You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.
- dflock 6y ago
  I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

Arubis 6y ago

A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems. Most of the time this feels like myopic hero-worship ("why doesn't Zuck just fix free speech?"). In this case, though, that would actually be _relevant_. Individuals or businesses with excess wealth that build value using the web would be well justified in working with MDN to ensure these docs stay alive and fresh.

oscargrouch 6y ago
> A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems Love how you creatively defined this concept. This is a recurring pattern i´ve seen particularly in tech, and its not just over billionaires.. In psychoanalysis theres this great lacanian concept of "Big Other". Once i understood this concept better, its much easier to spot my own flaws on counting on the Big Other (that is actually some illusory tendency of our minds to give us some comfort and help us to cope with the brutal reality). You can see a great fictional tale about this concept embodied in "The Wizard of Oz". Once we understand that the big other we were always counting on is in fact pretty much "smoke and mirrors", and that the big other (unlike in the wizard tale) doesnt really care, its a sour wake up call, but one that makes you grow up a little. And if you not only believe in Big Others, but also assume they have a good willing nature, especially the ones that followed a road paved with gold, i have a bridge to sell to you..

cft 6y ago

This corporate "moving forward" newspeak sounds ominous.

freshsqueeze 6y ago
Their layoff post began with "fighting systemic racism" and the coronavirus and the future of the Internet or something completely irrelevant.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago

I wouldn't think twice about paying $20/mo for MDN. My employer would probably even reimburse it. Same goes for Firefox's dev tools. They have some great features that Chrome doesn't.

gilrain 6y ago

An interesting solution could be to make MDN a paid site, as many suggest, but also offer it to libraries and universities for a token fee. The process is already in place and successful for scientific journals and encyclopedias, so the friction should be low. Then, the paid version would be the most convenient and attractive to anyone with $5 a month to spare, but everyone else could get access through the nearest library or university, a one-time hassle with equivalent access after. As a bonus it raises awareness and usage of libraries, which is good for everyone.

aerovistae 6y ago

This is a sad post. The MDN web docs are the internet handbook for javascript, html, and css, besides other browser technologies. this needs to be enshrined and freed of financial constraint. we are kind of failing.

deleted 6y ago

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spurgu 6y ago

What a fucking croc of inter-corporate motherfucking bullshit.

spurgu 6y ago

> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. So fucking work out that plan before this announcement. Corporate culture makes me wanna vomit.

IshKebab 6y ago
That's not really feasible. For very obvious reasons you can't tell every employee in a company "we're going to have to fire loads of you in a couple of months; please work out a plan to deal with that".

jacekm 6y ago

I think it would be ok if they were charging for _some_ of the content. Docs could stay free and they could charge for development courses. They could even make introductory courses free and charge only for advanced topics. Another example - browser compatibility matrices. They could be free just for the current versions of browsers and you'd have to pay for historical and future (i.e. development versions) data. I think it's possible to find a balance between making the essential knowledge free so newcomers can join the industry and charging those who already have a source of income. I know that 5$/month can still be too much in some parts of the world, but this could be addressed with regional pricing.

everybodyknows 6y ago
Yes, "freemium" -- that is the way. Another piece of content that could be premium at are the examples. Professional editors are necessary, to impose structure and standards, but as Stack overflow shows, technical knowledge contributions can be gotten for free with a bit of gamification.

zaphirplane 6y ago

One thing that surprised me was naming the CEO as co-founder.

freshsqueeze 6y ago

Google and Microsoft can just take over. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals from Google, at least they have a lot of experience building valuable user-facing at-scale sites. Microsoft has done more relevant open source and developer stuff in the last half decade.

kinlan 6y ago
Chrome DevRel lead here. We don't want that. We want to support MDN and for it to remain browser agnostic.

bosswipe 6y ago

The still unknown mystery is why the layoffs were necessary when Google signed the same contract that they have signed before. Mozilla corp-speak is so undecipherable that they leave a wake of panicked confusion with every one of these posts.

anotherevan 6y ago

https://patchfriday.com/92/ https://patchfriday.com/92/

dflock 6y ago

There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

rochak 6y ago
I’ll get some merch. Thanks!
freshqueeze 6y ago
I bet these pay for an exec's Tesla.
- sebazzz 6y ago
  That is also true for any non-profit you donate for. The Cancer non-profit, the Xyz decease non-profit. That is not strange. Non-profits require good leadership - and that comes with a salary.
JaggedJax 6y ago
Despite all the people in this thread saying they would happily donate directly to MDN, no one has responded here noticing that the donation page doesn't work.
- gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
  There's a discussion up the page.
kinlan 6y ago
And also implementors of the web specs and APIs (browsers and others) imo should fund it more effectively (disclosure, I lead Chrome Developer Relations).

aikah 6y ago

Google and Microsoft? You want to look good after all the stuff you pulled lately? Hire MDN maintainers and host MDN. Easy karma.

dmitriid 6y ago
Google is slowly trying to supplant that with https://web.dev/ https://web.dev/ They couldn't care less if MDN lived, and would be quite happy if MDN (and Mozilla) died, no one would challenge them on standards and technologies etc.
- esperent 6y ago
  Antitrust laws might.
- HJain13 6y ago
  MDN and web.dev play completely different roles for now. Also MDN doesn't factor in challenging Google for web standards and technologies, Firefox team might but MDN definitely doesn't
- kinlan 6y ago
  As the owner of web.dev we're absolutely not doing that. We're working with Mozilla and the PAB right now on what's need to support the future of MDN.
  - kinlan 6y ago
    To add, we already contribute a lot to MDN.
  - flingo 6y ago
    How did you find this comment?
heisenbit 6y ago
Do we need more concentration of power? Let‘s avoid for as long as we can manage.

computerex 6y ago

Mozilla is digging its own grave.

gregors 6y ago

Having to pay for documentation to build on your platform would seem like yet one more road block to having people use your platform.

breezest 6y ago

Isn't it better for Mozilla to "sell" some projects to other tech or foundations rather than keeping them internally and let them wither away?

andrew_ 6y ago

Mozilla putting a hold on DevRel investment is an industry bellwether. I'd be concerned if I held that position in tech.

kinlan 6y ago
Biased opinion. It depends if you've articulated the value of the function well. I do fear that if it's seen as a marketing function then it's an easy place to start tightening belts. If it's integrated into the product team then it's harder, imo.

coldtea 6y ago

>Our Co-Founder and CEO Mitchell Baker outlines the reasons why here. Why is that lawyer still there after 20 years of terrible decisions?

alwahi 6y ago

charlieflowers 6y ago

Maybe MDN should launch a KickStarter every year: "OK, we're up for annual renewal. If we meet our goal of $xx,xxx, MDN will stay around for another year. If not, we'll shut down our offices, lay off our staff, and just publish a static mirror of the current content."

Rastonbury 6y ago

Is basically a wiki right? Anyone can contribute? What proportion is written by paid staff and what proportion is written by public contributors? It seems like it suffers from a free rider problem which isn't at all helped by the lack of focus (and funds) in Mozilla's initiatives. I understand that people are sick of corporate greed, out-of-touch execs, etc but I don't blame Mozilla for deprioritizing it when they literally are running out of money to pay staff (this is a whole other issue in and of itself). It should be spun out with formalised its goals then go full wikipedia with annual fundraising or donation drives. If this fails they should look to be subsumed under similar non-profit foundations who can afford to maintain it. The free rider problem is not easily solved and if it isn't I expect MDN to decay, there isn't away around this.