29 ms·

MDN Plus

630 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

codeptualize 5y ago
Nice features, it seems they actually found some useful things. I like the notifications. Too bad it isn't available here yet, I will definitely sign up when I can.
- shaunpersad 5y ago
  Indeed, without clicking into it, my first thought was "why would anyone pay for free documentation?", but notifications in itself are actually pretty useful for web developers to stay on top of the landscape. I've also never downloaded a PWA before, but using it for docs actually makes a lot of sense. I like to look things up on my phone as I think about them throughout the day when I'm not at the computer, and a PWA should make this a lot faster and reliable.
andrew_ 5y ago
Am I an outlier or does their head of product not really appear to have a bead on what developers actually want?
- aldebran 5y ago
  This actually is a very good product. Pain points it addresses: 1. Notify when something changes 2. No clear and customizable learning path Business outcomes: 1. Generate revenue keeping privacy intact It seems to me this is a good solution. No need to make it about their head of product.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    Unless you have a different experience, Heads of Product tend to be the deciding yes/no vote with regard to product development decisions. It's not a personal thing, it's a role thing. You and I are in disagreement about this being a "good" product, but that's why I was asking if I'm an outlier. This looks completely useless to me, coming from 20 years as a developer. But, I may be an outlier.
  - sendilkumarn 5y ago
    Notifications : Do you really need it? How often do we track a tutorial? Collections : looks like a good option but bookmarks should help right? Offline : well :shrug:
greatgib 5y ago
Remember when the stated goal of the shit load of money they got was to open knowledge to everyone? Now they will do whatever to be a business!
jefftk 5y ago
Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!
- ary 5y ago
  I was a loud proponent of this and just signed up at the $10 tier. I'm thrilled to see they put this together but still dismayed at the re-org that resulted in firing (some?) of the staff that maintained MDN.
- nightski 5y ago
  I'll pay. But I kind of wish they were laser focused on just the content and not obligated to deliver useless pay for features.
  - paxys 5y ago
    The content isn't (and shouldn't be) paywalled. There's no option but to add other paid features around it, which someone users may find useless but others maybe won't. You could also always just treat it as a monthly donation and not use any of it.
    - nightski 5y ago
      That's my point. I'd rather donate and just have the money go towards improving the free content instead of them wasting time on email notifications and useless stuff like that. It feels like my money is being wasted when really I just wanted to support the wiki.
      - paxys 5y ago
        You could always have been donating already then. This is for people who may need these features and so start paying money when they weren't before.
        nightski 5y ago
lloydatkinson 5y ago
I guess firing many staff didn't really save them a lot in the long run then.
Shadonototra 5y ago
What a cash grab Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- blowski 5y ago
  https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/
  - stu2b50 5y ago
    That won't go to the firefox team, since the Firefox team is under the Mozilla Corporation whereas donations can only go to the Mozilla Foundation.
  - ngokevin 5y ago
    I don't think money is the issue with $500M coming from Google per year.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    This doesn't go to the Firefox team. It supports the Mozilla Foundation, but Firefox development is funded by the Mozilla Corporation.
  - reitanqild 5y ago
    That money cannot go to Firefox, only to cute projects and insane (IMO) CEO wages.
- aldebran 5y ago
  How do you propose they make money to keep doing what they do without violating your privacy? Treat this as an annual donation and don’t use the features. Seems like an easy solution.
- 5y ago
29athrowaway 5y ago
I would use this instead - Devdocs - Zeal on Linux and Windows - Dash on mac
- throwaway123808 5y ago
  I believe these all rely on MDN under the hood for their web docs
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    All of those have offline browsing, which would be a part of MDN plus.
ibejoeb 5y ago
I suppose offline access is nice. I think I'd rather pay for the ability to just download the whole site in some officially supported way. Priming a PWA baked into browser storage is a little roundabout. I want it to be grepable.
- cellshade 5y ago
  You can grab the full repo with the content here: https://github.com/mdn/content https://github.com/mdn/content
- beardedetim 5y ago
  There used to be a tool I used that just downloaded all the files of a site locally that the browser requested. Would that be enough here or are you imagining something like it also points all the links to be local and goes and saves future pages as well?
  - bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
    Wget?
  - HeckFeck 5y ago
    Httrack?
  - ibejoeb 5y ago
    Sure, anyone could just wget mirror the whole thing. My point is more in line with paying Mozilla. I'd be happy to support it, and a simple, precompiled download of MDN would be a good product. It's better for them because it doesn't hammer the infrastructure and better for the end-user because you just `tar xf` it.
- maxloh 5y ago
  You can use devdocs.io It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Melatonic 5y ago
How useful is this? I have never actually used it
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Not sure why I am being downvoted for this - I just legitimately want to know how useful this is and if its worth paying for.....
kristianpaul 5y ago
Well written and updated documentation is hard to find these days, like the Arch Linux Wiki
barrenko 5y ago
There is some space to earn money by providing "curriculum" for self-taught devs.
kingcharles 5y ago
All these features are available using other existing tools. This is just a nudge to donate to a worthy cause.
politelemon 5y ago
Mozilla ought to consider offering a bundle, at the moment they have several scattered offerings. Mozilla VPN (Mullvad) Firefox Relay MDN Plus Mozilla Pocket Premium Any others? Though I can see why it's currently scattered, it's not necessary that a VPN user cares about MDN or Pocket.
- inbx0 5y ago
  It's a real shame that they threw away Firefox Send. It would've been a great addition to that bundle.
  - nathancahill 5y ago
    The legal liability was too much to stomach. Look at the lawsuits against Mega.
    - flatiron 5y ago
      it got flooded with hosted malware as well. i think the free tier had a file size limit which at least clamped down on sharing pirated eldenring and blu-rays. apparently worked perfect for malware though
      - nathancahill 5y ago
        That limit was 1gb iirc. Your average movie torrent is 700mb.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Yeah, Mozilla prime would be nice. I don’t even use half of what amazon prime offers, but it feels like much better value for money to me.
l30n4da5 5y ago
Collections seems completely redundant when we have the ability to use favorites/bookmarks within our browser. Unless i'm missing something that makes collections significantly different/better.
- faffernot 5y ago
  Unrelated blog post: For a web app I recently designed a "favoriting/bookmarking" system that was requested by several people. Only like two to three people used it for a while, before they left for other jobs. Now no one uses it.
- jasonlotito 5y ago
  Just to give a point of view of someone who uses features like this on other sites, and genuinely likes this offering: I routinely use favoriting/saving features of various websites. For example, I routinely save and reference saved posts here on HN. The reason is my bookmarks don't sync across browsers, and I routinely use different browsers for different things. Further, the browser bookmarks/favorites system in place is generally pretty bad. This is especially true on learning/educational sites. I see things like Playlists on YouTube, for example. I could bookmark individual videos, but instead, I can offload that to YouTube, and not have that mucking up by bookmarks. It's the same reason I don't really rely on built-in password managers. They are useless if they are tied to a specific browser or a browser at all.
  - HellsMaddy 5y ago
    Agreed. I rarely use bookmarks, and when I do the only reason is to make the URL show up in omnibar suggestions faster. If I find content I really care about, I put it in my notes. Otherwise, if the content is interesting but not crucial, I use the site’s favoriting mechanism if available (GitHub stars mostly).
daveidol 5y ago
Honestly, this is the kind of thing I like to see from Mozilla. Very straightforward, plus a way to support this valuable learning resource. I hope it generates some meaningful revenue!
trey-jones 5y ago
My early April Fools prank detector is going off. No?
- Nicksil 5y ago
  No. Why would this be an April Fools prank?
jraph 5y ago
It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers. In practice, if you are not paying: - Bookmarks can most certainly easily replace the Collections feature - you can clone the MDN repository for having the documents offline - notifications could be computed from the commit log and the subscription probably makes these features more convenient, at least for the notifications and the offline without actually removing rights from anybody. Seems clever.
- runarberg 5y ago
  This is a fair point. I am a supporter of OGS (online-go.com) and I get the same sense of convenience benefits as perks which I could get anyway with only some minimum effort. However I do like this go server and I use it a lot, they deserve my money, and getting some perks back for my donations just feels nice. It is a way for them to say: “Hey, we appreciate your donations, have some perks”.
- rhizome 5y ago
  Just to leave a stake in the sand here for future reference, I'm sure they will introduce subscriber-only content at some point.
- ComodoHacker 5y ago
  The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.
  - fckthisguy 5y ago
    Ring fencing funds could be a real issue for Mozilla. They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser) since it's non- revenue earning. I wouldn't mind these funds going towards Firefox, or even other products woth a little reluctance, but agree they shouldn't go towards other costs like bonuses or "operation costs".
hbn 5y ago
I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.
- 2143 5y ago
  Probably not very often. Next time you're flying across the pond, try coding (without bothering to subscribe to onboard wifi). Also, it can be useful in places where steady internet is sketchy, which is a lot of places. The folks at 100 rabbits [1] would be happy. [1] https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html
  - hbn 5y ago
    Right, but I think those situations are far and few between. If you're a person who is regularly without internet access, there's probably better areas to work in than the web where you may need to deploy emergency fixes on short notice. And regardless, it seems like offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase? It's not like the web is rapidly evolving at all times, with major updates being released annually. It's a good chunk of years before enough browsers are updated to support new APIs, so if you grabbed the current docs you'd probably be able to work with that for a while.
    - 2143 5y ago
      > offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase Stingy me would just wget download the entire documentation if I anticipate that I might go offline. Can't say I'll ever be okay with paying for documentation; I don't want that to catch on.
- rtpg 5y ago
  I use Zeal. You can have super fast internet, but having instant "pop up the python docs for this thing" along with searching while typing is a joy. It's much more useful for specific API docs rather than general "how do I do X" stuff but it's very nice. Helps that you don't have to deal with scrolling through stuff like web3schools.
mrzimmerman 5y ago
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed to personally organize parts of MDN but I might just subscribe to support the place. Who knows, maybe I’ll love the new features. Notifications could be helpful, though I’m more the “check in when I’m about to use some method to see if it’s changed” kind of engineer and less the “stay as up to date as possible” kind of engineer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  Notifications could be hugely valuable for developers who are looking to build feature-rich apps that rely on lots of new web platform features that are not yet supported on all browsers.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Why? You'll know them anyway from caniuse, given if you want to support a broad range of users you won't want to just support the latest version of browsers anyway.
  - Seattle3503 5y ago
    Depreciation alerts might help too. I wonder if MDN could build a tool to go through your HTML and JS/TS and notify you of upcoming changes that might impact you.
    - fckthisguy 5y ago
      A sort of reverse-caniuse scanner. I'd love that!
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Is it possible to donate directly to MDN somehow? I already donate to the Mozilla foundation, not sure if that money all goes to the same place.
  - ketzo 5y ago
impalallama 5y ago
what ever makes mdn sustainable going into the future
KindAndFriendly 5y ago
The other day I wanted to learn Svelte. Even though the tutorials on the Svelte homepage are great, I found the MDN Svelte tutorial to be better: it explains the conceptual differences wrt other frontend frameworks well, it explains in detail how to enable Typescript and migrate your projects, and it has a dedicated section that describes different deployment options. While of - of course - all of these infos can be found somewhere on the web as well, I very much appreciate such a well-written, holistic intro to a framework. I signed up for the MDN Plus 5 plan. P.S.: If someone from the MDN team is reading this, maybe include a "sign up" link directly in the blog article from Hermina.
- culopatin 5y ago
  Same with Django. It feels like the MDN tutorials come from someone that knows more of what you’ll run into when learning it. The Django docs while great have a bit of that “I built this so let me give you ALL the details or a very basic thing”. MSN is right in the middle.
  - charrondev 5y ago
    That’s the difference between the person who made the docs - Being a good technical writer. - Being some who learned the tool/platform rather than someone who built the platform. It much harder to write a doc on something if you’ve never been able to look at it from an outside perspective.
- zepearl 5y ago
  (unrelated to the main topic) > The other day I wanted to learn Svelte... Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far? Asking because it's on my to-do list for my future frontend (bought 2 books about it, but pending to be read as I'm currently first trying to assimilate "Rust" to program the backends) and I ended up selecting Svelte as potential best candidate after having read the docs & having played with its tutorials => I therefore got a general "positive initial feeling" about it. The last time I wrote a web-UI was many years ago with PHP & Codeigniter & some hand-written Javascript (from my POV that was alright, lightweight/simple/flexible/low-effort and performance was ok, I would/could do that again but maybe Svelte might be better for what I'd like to do now), so I'm not really up-to-date in this area - Svelte just sounds lightweight & flexible enough for me... . Cheers :)
dend 5y ago
This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided. Speaking from my own experience: - Notifications. I am not sure that I've ever needed to know when a doc is updated, because if there is anything radical coming on the market (or in a spec proposal), there are other avenues to find out about it. - Collections. That is already a functionality in the browser that is not locked into just one documentation site. - Offline mode. There is Zeal[0] if you like client-side software and devdocs.io[1] if you like browser mode. Combine all that with the fact that it's just for MDN, and the appeal kind of disappears. YMMV, of course. [0]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ [1]: https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  Re: notifications I think it's a smart move. Back when I was content lead for https://web.dev https://web.dev I was floating around ideas along the same lines. Web developers learn of great new feature X and are disappointed to learn that it's only supported on a single browser. They then forget about the feature for years even though in the meantime it has been implemented on all their target browsers. Notifications of some sort solves this problem. I agree however that whether people will pay for this feature is debatable. Browser vendors should be incentivized to provide this feature for free somehow because it's in their own best interest to increase adoption of new web platform features.
  - dend 5y ago
    Also, things like collections have been on sites like docs.microsoft.com[0] for some time. I find it somewhat odd personally to gate documentation-related features behind a membership fee, but I do not have full context on MDN product decisions or roadmap. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-nodejs?tabs=windows&pivots=development-environment-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-node...
- chronogram 5y ago
  That devdocs as a PWA is really handy, thanks.
jacekm 5y ago
I like the idea! While I do not need these premium features I wanted to hit the "sign me up" button instantly just to support them. But then I found out that there's no such button and my country is not on going to be supported anytime soon. And if MDN people are reading this: consider adding an "enterprise" option with centralized account management.
- HellsMaddy 5y ago
  I find the regional availability odd for a product like this. What could be the reason? Maybe payment processing, or i18n?
  - neurostimulant 5y ago
    Mozilla is always bad at supporting international customers on their commercial products. Surely their payment processor is capable of accepting cards from all countries where visa and mastercard operate, right? So what's stopping them from selling their products in all countries? Tax? It's especially hilarious when their vpn products only available for select countries, but their vendor (Mullvad) accept purchases from all countries.
wnevets 5y ago
Does anyone else dislike the recent redesign? Is there anyway to switch back?
subpixel 5y ago
There's something in the water at Mozilla that negatively effects all product decisions. Notifications and collections are features, not a product. A viable and attractive MDN product would be a subscription to all the layers above the existing docs and guides, combined with a major initiative to connect with experts to create course material and sell it as a part of the platform. MDN: what got you here won't get you where you want to go.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- matyasrichter 5y ago
  > Notifications and collections are features, not a product. What is a product other than a set of features? Especially in case of a paid tier on top of an existing free service.
  - subpixel 5y ago
    A paid tier would be a product if it granted you access to content that solves problems you can't get for free. My take is this isn't a paid tier. It's paid features, e.g. notifications. That's not to say it provides no value, but that there is massive value being unrealized.
mplewis 5y ago
This is great! I'm glad to have a way to directly support MDN for the work that they do. MDN is by far the most valuable part of the work Mozilla puts out.
dfabulich 5y ago
The only good offering here is available as part of the $10/month "Supporter" plan, a "direct feedback channel to the MDN team." The video describes that as "regular chats with MDN engineers." Shockingly, this isn't even listed as a featured bullet on the plan list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe The only bulleted advantages of paying $10/month are, "Early access to new features" and "Pride and joy." As others have noted here, none of the "Plus" features are very useful: Collections, Notifications, and Offline support. Collections are just bookmarks, which all browsers do for free. Notifications are pointless, because all of the pages are on Github; you can subscribe to notifications there (but why would you even want to??). And I approximately never need to use MDN when I'm offline. We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result. EDIT: Buyer beware, I just signed up for the plan, and all it does is add a "Feedback" menu item that links to https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback … but that's a public repo. Anyone can file an issue there. I certainly did, and I'm not happy about it. https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43 https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43 There's no Discord, no forum, no mailing list, no scheduled upcoming fireside chat… just a public Github repo where you can file an issue and hope for a response.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Who is left on the team that can help paying folks work through web related questions? As I understand it the MDN team only exists to manage user contributed content. So you can book a call to talk to some project managers about how they convince people to give free content I guess? Or put another way, why wouldn't you just pay money directly to the content creators who are putting stuff on MDN? These are likely the folks making patreons, paid courses, etc. and are the subject matter experts you'd want to engage.
- MaxLeiter 5y ago
  I can imagine notifications being useful if you’re waiting for a browser to add a feature or something
amatecha 5y ago
Nice, now can they finally stop taking money from Google? :) "The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year." "Mozilla's long-term plan is to build its own revenue streams from subscription-based services and reduce its dependence on the Google search deal" <-- I guess MDN Plus would be one of those subscription-based services! [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
- ronyfadel 5y ago
  Not even close. Even if they get 100,000 paying monthly users in the first year, that’s only $6-12M/yr.
lowercased 5y ago
The long descriptive post ends with "We invite you to try the free trial version or sign up today for a subscription plan that’s right for you." But... no sign up button. Two of the internal links point to more info on features, which have a different menu at the top with a 'get mdn plus' button. I guess that's how you're supposed to get it? Just surprised they felt the need to avoid putting a sign up link on the blog post. Yes, that's a bit rude, I know.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Yeah, I looked several times for an actual link to MDN Plus and couldn't find it.
- altano 5y ago
  Same here, took me a solid 5m to find a way to sign up. Add a link the announcement blog post and the FAQ, Mozilla.
- lowercased 5y ago
  HEY - look at that - thanks for adding the links at the bottom of the post MDN :)
dzogchen 5y ago
I was sitting on the train yesterday, when I opened a tab with a page from MDN that was already loaded. It quickly jumped to 'cannot connect' even though I didn't refresh. I wondered why it did that, but it makes perfect sense now. Now I use Zeal[1] to still have the documentation available offline. [1]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/
- KyeRussell 5y ago
  There are explanations for that that aren’t as nefarious as what you’re implying.
rsstack 5y ago
Subscribed. Would love if the $10/user/mo plan included shared collections for the entire team.
Darmody 5y ago
I wish they put some effort into making Firefox better. To me, lately Firefox has been a pain in the ass to use. Regular silent updates that forces me to restart the browser and close all my work. Saving my session doesn't always help to continue working where it was interrupted. The latest change to the downloads is horrible. Sometimes my work requires me to download hundreds of files that I only want to open with some software for several seconds, then dismiss it. Now instead of being able to open it directly from the browser, I have to watch how everything is saved in my downloads folder and then waste my time deleting all those files manually. I'm not paying them any money. I don't want to waste my money only to see their executives getting richer without anything in return.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  I'm using FF only because there are no other options for me (I've tried). I miss old Opera.
  - Darmody 5y ago
    Same here. To me it's starting to feel like Windows several years ago. Features that don't bring anything new to the table but pushes their own agenda. I've been using linux for years now and I can't be happier but I can't find a replacement to Firefox. FF is so good that even it's being sabotaged it's better than all the alternatives. Sadly the engineering behind a browser is no joke and I don't think anybody else will create or work on an alternative to Webkit/Blink.
- quesera 5y ago
  > The latest change to the downloads is horrible. about:config browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel false ...will revert to the old behaviour.
  - Darmody 5y ago
stmpjmpr 5y ago
There's a "Get MDN Plus" at the top of the MDN pages. Link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus
999900000999 5y ago
Why does everything need to be a subscription. Sell me a product, like a JavaScript book or some merch. Or just put up the donation link. I do want to give y'all money, but a recurring subscription is too much.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Yeah, automatic subscriptions are terrible. What if you stop using it for a few months or years? Do you un and re subscribe each time? You'll need a spreadsheet to keep track of all these things. A lifetime subscription for a few hundred bucks seems like it would make more sense. Or paying per use, like a cent per page. Easier for accounting and for peace of mind.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Love those lifetime subscriptions, or ones that at least let you do more than 1 year up front but not on auto-renew.
codazoda 5y ago
Sailing is a long-time dream that I probably won't be able to realize in my lifetime. But, if I did ever go sailing, I would need something like parts of MDN downloaded. Doing computer work is what I love and I'm sure it's what I would use my spare time for. Clearly this has usefulness far beyond that niche case, but I love the idea that Mozilla has found a really useful thing to charge for. I hope that they can be successful with it.
- subpixel 5y ago
  Just a note to assure you that while sailing you will spend all of your time maintaining the systems that keep the rigging and electricity in working order. Any time you have left over will be spent researching which other boat you should get.
BeeKeeper 5y ago
If you want to support MDN, donate to OpenWebDocs.org. That supports open web content documentation on MDN for everybody. Personally, I have the repo locally, so Plus isn't tempting. But if it adds something that is of value to you, giving money to mozilla isn't a waste I don't think. That said, Open Web Docs is a good investment. I think it's even tax deductible, but either way, it can be written off as a business expense.
bdlowery 5y ago
I'd pay if I could get the old theme back.
pipeline_peak 5y ago
I think Mozilla should switch back to their old dinosaur mascot, it seems more relatable than ever.
peteforde 5y ago
Dear MDN: Congratulations on the launch. I hope that your best days are ahead. Thanks, from the bottom of my cynical heart, for the thousands of times you've told me exactly what I needed to know.
efficax 5y ago
Would be great if they had an enterprise level so i could get my work to buy this for us
mpolichette 5y ago
MDN docs are the best... they should monetize via high level articles and example implementations for systems. For example, the webRTC docs are great and explain a lot about how it works... however, there is very little information about good patterns for including it in your application. I bet people would be happy to pay for guides like that, I would.
nabaraz 5y ago
I don't need any of MDN plus's features. Just give me Firefox at $5/month without ads, pocket, sponsored news, telemtry, affiliate links and all the data collection.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chatmasta 5y ago
Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this? In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I would love to see a solution like that. Or even if we could reliably tie a corporation to pay a fixed amount if they use free software would be nice.
  - wahnfrieden 5y ago
    You won’t find a satisfactory solution to this under the economic model they operate within
    - theteapot 5y ago
      Taxes are real. I even read about them in a modern economics text book.
- rswail 5y ago
  Google "contributes" whatever they are paying to Mozilla every year. The reason Mozilla exists is to maintain "plausible deniability" in terms of anti-trust for the other browser "vendors", which used to be IE, but is now Chrome(-ium).
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Their biggest competitor is a major, no?
koprulusector 5y ago
Subscribed (to the Supporter plan @ annual)
ramesh31 5y ago
This makes my soul hurt.
clairity 5y ago
> "In 2020 and 2021 we surveyed over 60,000 MDN users and learned that many of the respondents wanted a customized MDN experience. They wanted to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them." in 2022, i really hate this "users told us" phrasing, because it's always misleading, and even normative at the margin. users didn't tell you anything, you inferred that from, here, a single survey (and that's more pretext than most provide). left to our own devices, users express feelings first and foremost, even if formulated reasonably. it's almost always ad hoc rationalization, because most users don't care enough to think deeply enough about your product in that moment of inquiry. you have to elicit and infer what they value, and there are plenty of quantitative (marketing) techniques these days to do so, but that takes real work and forethought. this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over, and it's naive at the very least. it's also how you get a product feature list that most people here (potential customers and customer advocates) seem to feel is lackluster and are even mocking. with all that said, i find this offering at least closer to something i'd pay for than something like pocket or vpn. there are tons of value-added features that mozilla can offer on top of a browser and web dev that no one else would really want to tackle. they just need to do some real market research, rather than larp'ing it. (i really should start a product blog just to catalog all these silly things.)
- cxr 5y ago
  > i really hate this "users told us" phrasing[...] this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over Except that's a made up quote. That phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the part you lifted from the blog post (the thing that's an _actual_ quote) or any other part of it.
  - clairity 5y ago
    talk about a "whoosh"! sometimes we characterize a phenomenon with a succinct phrase that's meant to represent more than the literal quote.
    - cxr 5y ago
      That's not a "whoosh". I know what you were doing. (And it's a rotten thing to do—not least of all because your fake quote changes so much that it differs substantially in a way that your comment is not even relevant to what they actually wrote.) Don't make up quotes. It's against the rules. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789>
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Good to see them working on reasonable ways to monetize and support continued development and maintenance
galaxyLogic 5y ago
Why doesn't MDN go the Stack Overflow route and allow people to ask questions and even answer them and curate it all?
Rapzid 5y ago
I don't feel anyone should need to personally "donate" to MDN or feel compelled to out of some sense of moral obligation; or any other reason for that matter. This isn't a donation per-say, but many on here seem to not care one iota about the features but still express a sentiment to want to "donate".. The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much delegated documenting how to develop against the browser platform to MDN. Microsoft explicitly I believe? This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO. This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. How 'bout some blog posts about how you plan to get Apple, Microsoft, and Google to foot the entire bill for the operation?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. Always starts like that, but once they have enterprise subscriptions I can make a case for onboarding 100s of developers at a time.
- ochoseis 5y ago
  > This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO. Any entity will tailor the value it provides to the desires of its benefactors. So, if you would like MDN content focused on AMP, ads, and the metaverse, then this sounds like a good approach.
  - gfxgirl 5y ago
    All of those companies want knowledgable developers as well as helping their own developers. They have enough incentive and self interest to fund MDN without having them focus on corp products.
- drstewart 5y ago
  Is there anything the internet believes people should pay for that Apple and Google shouldn't? I think at this point people have balanced the entire global government budget + all consumer spending against a handful of tech company's balance sheets. It's funny nobody does this against less visible but equally powerful companies. I don't hear anyone claiming Cargill should be funding open standards ag tech. Literally populism.
polote 5y ago
> Collections: Find what you need fast with our new collections feature. Collection is a feature we see in more an more knowledge sharing tools. Biggest user of that feature today is probably pinterest. The two usages that you can use them for is curation and quick retrieval. If you strip the collaborative part (curation) then YOU JUST reinvent bookmarks. Congrats mdn
prokopton 5y ago
Why is it region-locked? I'm in Japan—looking at the English page—and the Plus page says it's not available in my region.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  That was my first question as well. Guess they can’t deal with the tax implications?
thekoma 5y ago
That's all well but I actually preferred the previous style of the MDN Docs website.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giancarlostoro 5y ago
MDN is literally the documentation for everything front-end web that is built-in to browsers and a little more. I hope all of the income from this goes back into MDN. If there's a project that deserves my eternal gratitude, MDN is up there as a web developer. Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on MDN or contributed at any capacity.
skissane 5y ago
> Today, MDN Plus is available in the US and Canada. In the coming months, we will expand to other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)
mstade 5y ago
Wait, so you mean to say I can pay $50 a year for high quality documentation that is eminently useful in my day to day work, and I get things like notifications when said content changes? And on top of that, I’ll be supporting free access to said content to those who might need it he most, like kids learning to program or rookies just starting their careers? AND it’s tax deductible? Pfft, shut up and take my moneys please! I have no need for any of the stuff in the supporter plan but even at $100 a year this is a total bargain. I know I don’t have to pay for it, but with the amount of value I’ve gotten out of MDN over the years it’s a steAl. I’ll buy this as soon as am back at my laptop. I have no analytics to support it, but I swear !mdn is my most used DuckDuckGo shortcut. I’m signing up as soon as I’m back at my laptop.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Same. I have been using MDN for 15 years.
- tdy_err 5y ago
  Let's hope that money will actually get recycled into MDN and not just into the CEO's $3+ million salary.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

630 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

Nice features, it seems they actually found some useful things. I like the notifications. Too bad it isn't available here yet, I will definitely sign up when I can.

shaunpersad 5y ago
Indeed, without clicking into it, my first thought was "why would anyone pay for free documentation?", but notifications in itself are actually pretty useful for web developers to stay on top of the landscape. I've also never downloaded a PWA before, but using it for docs actually makes a lot of sense. I like to look things up on my phone as I think about them throughout the day when I'm not at the computer, and a PWA should make this a lot faster and reliable.

andrew_ 5y ago

Am I an outlier or does their head of product not really appear to have a bead on what developers actually want?

aldebran 5y ago
This actually is a very good product. Pain points it addresses: 1. Notify when something changes 2. No clear and customizable learning path Business outcomes: 1. Generate revenue keeping privacy intact It seems to me this is a good solution. No need to make it about their head of product.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Unless you have a different experience, Heads of Product tend to be the deciding yes/no vote with regard to product development decisions. It's not a personal thing, it's a role thing. You and I are in disagreement about this being a "good" product, but that's why I was asking if I'm an outlier. This looks completely useless to me, coming from 20 years as a developer. But, I may be an outlier.
- sendilkumarn 5y ago
  Notifications : Do you really need it? How often do we track a tutorial? Collections : looks like a good option but bookmarks should help right? Offline : well :shrug:

greatgib 5y ago

Remember when the stated goal of the shit load of money they got was to open knowledge to everyone? Now they will do whatever to be a business!

jefftk 5y ago

Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!

ary 5y ago
I was a loud proponent of this and just signed up at the $10 tier. I'm thrilled to see they put this together but still dismayed at the re-org that resulted in firing (some?) of the staff that maintained MDN.
nightski 5y ago
I'll pay. But I kind of wish they were laser focused on just the content and not obligated to deliver useless pay for features.
- paxys 5y ago
  The content isn't (and shouldn't be) paywalled. There's no option but to add other paid features around it, which someone users may find useless but others maybe won't. You could also always just treat it as a monthly donation and not use any of it.
  - nightski 5y ago
    That's my point. I'd rather donate and just have the money go towards improving the free content instead of them wasting time on email notifications and useless stuff like that. It feels like my money is being wasted when really I just wanted to support the wiki.
    - paxys 5y ago
      You could always have been donating already then. This is for people who may need these features and so start paying money when they weren't before.
      - nightski 5y ago

lloydatkinson 5y ago

I guess firing many staff didn't really save them a lot in the long run then.

Shadonototra 5y ago

What a cash grab Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blowski 5y ago
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/
- stu2b50 5y ago
  That won't go to the firefox team, since the Firefox team is under the Mozilla Corporation whereas donations can only go to the Mozilla Foundation.
- ngokevin 5y ago
  I don't think money is the issue with $500M coming from Google per year.
- jefftk 5y ago
  This doesn't go to the Firefox team. It supports the Mozilla Foundation, but Firefox development is funded by the Mozilla Corporation.
- reitanqild 5y ago
  That money cannot go to Firefox, only to cute projects and insane (IMO) CEO wages.
aldebran 5y ago
How do you propose they make money to keep doing what they do without violating your privacy? Treat this as an annual donation and don’t use the features. Seems like an easy solution.
5y ago

29athrowaway 5y ago

I would use this instead - Devdocs - Zeal on Linux and Windows - Dash on mac

throwaway123808 5y ago
I believe these all rely on MDN under the hood for their web docs
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  All of those have offline browsing, which would be a part of MDN plus.

ibejoeb 5y ago

I suppose offline access is nice. I think I'd rather pay for the ability to just download the whole site in some officially supported way. Priming a PWA baked into browser storage is a little roundabout. I want it to be grepable.

cellshade 5y ago
You can grab the full repo with the content here: https://github.com/mdn/content https://github.com/mdn/content
beardedetim 5y ago
There used to be a tool I used that just downloaded all the files of a site locally that the browser requested. Would that be enough here or are you imagining something like it also points all the links to be local and goes and saves future pages as well?
- bqmjjx0kac 5y ago
  Wget?
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  Httrack?
- ibejoeb 5y ago
  Sure, anyone could just wget mirror the whole thing. My point is more in line with paying Mozilla. I'd be happy to support it, and a simple, precompiled download of MDN would be a good product. It's better for them because it doesn't hammer the infrastructure and better for the end-user because you just `tar xf` it.
maxloh 5y ago
You can use devdocs.io It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Melatonic 5y ago

How useful is this? I have never actually used it

Melatonic 5y ago
Not sure why I am being downvoted for this - I just legitimately want to know how useful this is and if its worth paying for.....

kristianpaul 5y ago

Well written and updated documentation is hard to find these days, like the Arch Linux Wiki

barrenko 5y ago

There is some space to earn money by providing "curriculum" for self-taught devs.

kingcharles 5y ago

All these features are available using other existing tools. This is just a nudge to donate to a worthy cause.

politelemon 5y ago

Mozilla ought to consider offering a bundle, at the moment they have several scattered offerings. Mozilla VPN (Mullvad) Firefox Relay MDN Plus Mozilla Pocket Premium Any others? Though I can see why it's currently scattered, it's not necessary that a VPN user cares about MDN or Pocket.

inbx0 5y ago
It's a real shame that they threw away Firefox Send. It would've been a great addition to that bundle.
- nathancahill 5y ago
  The legal liability was too much to stomach. Look at the lawsuits against Mega.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    it got flooded with hosted malware as well. i think the free tier had a file size limit which at least clamped down on sharing pirated eldenring and blu-rays. apparently worked perfect for malware though
    - nathancahill 5y ago
      That limit was 1gb iirc. Your average movie torrent is 700mb.
Aeolun 5y ago
Yeah, Mozilla prime would be nice. I don’t even use half of what amazon prime offers, but it feels like much better value for money to me.

l30n4da5 5y ago

Collections seems completely redundant when we have the ability to use favorites/bookmarks within our browser. Unless i'm missing something that makes collections significantly different/better.

faffernot 5y ago
Unrelated blog post: For a web app I recently designed a "favoriting/bookmarking" system that was requested by several people. Only like two to three people used it for a while, before they left for other jobs. Now no one uses it.
jasonlotito 5y ago
Just to give a point of view of someone who uses features like this on other sites, and genuinely likes this offering: I routinely use favoriting/saving features of various websites. For example, I routinely save and reference saved posts here on HN. The reason is my bookmarks don't sync across browsers, and I routinely use different browsers for different things. Further, the browser bookmarks/favorites system in place is generally pretty bad. This is especially true on learning/educational sites. I see things like Playlists on YouTube, for example. I could bookmark individual videos, but instead, I can offload that to YouTube, and not have that mucking up by bookmarks. It's the same reason I don't really rely on built-in password managers. They are useless if they are tied to a specific browser or a browser at all.
- HellsMaddy 5y ago
  Agreed. I rarely use bookmarks, and when I do the only reason is to make the URL show up in omnibar suggestions faster. If I find content I really care about, I put it in my notes. Otherwise, if the content is interesting but not crucial, I use the site’s favoriting mechanism if available (GitHub stars mostly).

daveidol 5y ago

Honestly, this is the kind of thing I like to see from Mozilla. Very straightforward, plus a way to support this valuable learning resource. I hope it generates some meaningful revenue!

trey-jones 5y ago

My early April Fools prank detector is going off. No?

Nicksil 5y ago
No. Why would this be an April Fools prank?

jraph 5y ago

It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers. In practice, if you are not paying: - Bookmarks can most certainly easily replace the Collections feature - you can clone the MDN repository for having the documents offline - notifications could be computed from the commit log and the subscription probably makes these features more convenient, at least for the notifications and the offline without actually removing rights from anybody. Seems clever.

runarberg 5y ago
This is a fair point. I am a supporter of OGS (online-go.com) and I get the same sense of convenience benefits as perks which I could get anyway with only some minimum effort. However I do like this go server and I use it a lot, they deserve my money, and getting some perks back for my donations just feels nice. It is a way for them to say: “Hey, we appreciate your donations, have some perks”.
rhizome 5y ago
Just to leave a stake in the sand here for future reference, I'm sure they will introduce subscriber-only content at some point.
ComodoHacker 5y ago
The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  Ring fencing funds could be a real issue for Mozilla. They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser) since it's non- revenue earning. I wouldn't mind these funds going towards Firefox, or even other products woth a little reluctance, but agree they shouldn't go towards other costs like bonuses or "operation costs".

hbn 5y ago

I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.

2143 5y ago
Probably not very often. Next time you're flying across the pond, try coding (without bothering to subscribe to onboard wifi). Also, it can be useful in places where steady internet is sketchy, which is a lot of places. The folks at 100 rabbits [1] would be happy. [1] https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html
- hbn 5y ago
  Right, but I think those situations are far and few between. If you're a person who is regularly without internet access, there's probably better areas to work in than the web where you may need to deploy emergency fixes on short notice. And regardless, it seems like offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase? It's not like the web is rapidly evolving at all times, with major updates being released annually. It's a good chunk of years before enough browsers are updated to support new APIs, so if you grabbed the current docs you'd probably be able to work with that for a while.
  - 2143 5y ago
    > offline web API documentation would make more sense as a one-time purchase Stingy me would just wget download the entire documentation if I anticipate that I might go offline. Can't say I'll ever be okay with paying for documentation; I don't want that to catch on.
rtpg 5y ago
I use Zeal. You can have super fast internet, but having instant "pop up the python docs for this thing" along with searching while typing is a joy. It's much more useful for specific API docs rather than general "how do I do X" stuff but it's very nice. Helps that you don't have to deal with scrolling through stuff like web3schools.

mrzimmerman 5y ago

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed to personally organize parts of MDN but I might just subscribe to support the place. Who knows, maybe I’ll love the new features. Notifications could be helpful, though I’m more the “check in when I’m about to use some method to see if it’s changed” kind of engineer and less the “stay as up to date as possible” kind of engineer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.

kaycebasques 5y ago
Notifications could be hugely valuable for developers who are looking to build feature-rich apps that rely on lots of new web platform features that are not yet supported on all browsers.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Why? You'll know them anyway from caniuse, given if you want to support a broad range of users you won't want to just support the latest version of browsers anyway.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  Depreciation alerts might help too. I wonder if MDN could build a tool to go through your HTML and JS/TS and notify you of upcoming changes that might impact you.
  - fckthisguy 5y ago
    A sort of reverse-caniuse scanner. I'd love that!
nerdponx 5y ago
Is it possible to donate directly to MDN somehow? I already donate to the Mozilla foundation, not sure if that money all goes to the same place.
- ketzo 5y ago

impalallama 5y ago

what ever makes mdn sustainable going into the future

KindAndFriendly 5y ago

The other day I wanted to learn Svelte. Even though the tutorials on the Svelte homepage are great, I found the MDN Svelte tutorial to be better: it explains the conceptual differences wrt other frontend frameworks well, it explains in detail how to enable Typescript and migrate your projects, and it has a dedicated section that describes different deployment options. While of - of course - all of these infos can be found somewhere on the web as well, I very much appreciate such a well-written, holistic intro to a framework. I signed up for the MDN Plus 5 plan. P.S.: If someone from the MDN team is reading this, maybe include a "sign up" link directly in the blog article from Hermina.

culopatin 5y ago
Same with Django. It feels like the MDN tutorials come from someone that knows more of what you’ll run into when learning it. The Django docs while great have a bit of that “I built this so let me give you ALL the details or a very basic thing”. MSN is right in the middle.
- charrondev 5y ago
  That’s the difference between the person who made the docs - Being a good technical writer. - Being some who learned the tool/platform rather than someone who built the platform. It much harder to write a doc on something if you’ve never been able to look at it from an outside perspective.
zepearl 5y ago
(unrelated to the main topic) > The other day I wanted to learn Svelte... Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far? Asking because it's on my to-do list for my future frontend (bought 2 books about it, but pending to be read as I'm currently first trying to assimilate "Rust" to program the backends) and I ended up selecting Svelte as potential best candidate after having read the docs & having played with its tutorials => I therefore got a general "positive initial feeling" about it. The last time I wrote a web-UI was many years ago with PHP & Codeigniter & some hand-written Javascript (from my POV that was alright, lightweight/simple/flexible/low-effort and performance was ok, I would/could do that again but maybe Svelte might be better for what I'd like to do now), so I'm not really up-to-date in this area - Svelte just sounds lightweight & flexible enough for me... . Cheers :)

dend 5y ago

This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided. Speaking from my own experience: - Notifications. I am not sure that I've ever needed to know when a doc is updated, because if there is anything radical coming on the market (or in a spec proposal), there are other avenues to find out about it. - Collections. That is already a functionality in the browser that is not locked into just one documentation site. - Offline mode. There is Zeal[0] if you like client-side software and devdocs.io[1] if you like browser mode. Combine all that with the fact that it's just for MDN, and the appeal kind of disappears. YMMV, of course. [0]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/ [1]: https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/

kaycebasques 5y ago
Re: notifications I think it's a smart move. Back when I was content lead for https://web.dev https://web.dev I was floating around ideas along the same lines. Web developers learn of great new feature X and are disappointed to learn that it's only supported on a single browser. They then forget about the feature for years even though in the meantime it has been implemented on all their target browsers. Notifications of some sort solves this problem. I agree however that whether people will pay for this feature is debatable. Browser vendors should be incentivized to provide this feature for free somehow because it's in their own best interest to increase adoption of new web platform features.
- dend 5y ago
  Also, things like collections have been on sites like docs.microsoft.com[0] for some time. I find it somewhat odd personally to gate documentation-related features behind a membership fee, but I do not have full context on MDN product decisions or roadmap. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-nodejs?tabs=windows&pivots=development-environment-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-node...
chronogram 5y ago
That devdocs as a PWA is really handy, thanks.

jacekm 5y ago

I like the idea! While I do not need these premium features I wanted to hit the "sign me up" button instantly just to support them. But then I found out that there's no such button and my country is not on going to be supported anytime soon. And if MDN people are reading this: consider adding an "enterprise" option with centralized account management.

HellsMaddy 5y ago
I find the regional availability odd for a product like this. What could be the reason? Maybe payment processing, or i18n?
- neurostimulant 5y ago
  Mozilla is always bad at supporting international customers on their commercial products. Surely their payment processor is capable of accepting cards from all countries where visa and mastercard operate, right? So what's stopping them from selling their products in all countries? Tax? It's especially hilarious when their vpn products only available for select countries, but their vendor (Mullvad) accept purchases from all countries.

wnevets 5y ago

Does anyone else dislike the recent redesign? Is there anyway to switch back?

subpixel 5y ago

There's something in the water at Mozilla that negatively effects all product decisions. Notifications and collections are features, not a product. A viable and attractive MDN product would be a subscription to all the layers above the existing docs and guides, combined with a major initiative to connect with experts to create course material and sell it as a part of the platform. MDN: what got you here won't get you where you want to go.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
matyasrichter 5y ago
> Notifications and collections are features, not a product. What is a product other than a set of features? Especially in case of a paid tier on top of an existing free service.
- subpixel 5y ago
  A paid tier would be a product if it granted you access to content that solves problems you can't get for free. My take is this isn't a paid tier. It's paid features, e.g. notifications. That's not to say it provides no value, but that there is massive value being unrealized.

mplewis 5y ago

This is great! I'm glad to have a way to directly support MDN for the work that they do. MDN is by far the most valuable part of the work Mozilla puts out.

dfabulich 5y ago

The only good offering here is available as part of the $10/month "Supporter" plan, a "direct feedback channel to the MDN team." The video describes that as "regular chats with MDN engineers." Shockingly, this isn't even listed as a featured bullet on the plan list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe The only bulleted advantages of paying $10/month are, "Early access to new features" and "Pride and joy." As others have noted here, none of the "Plus" features are very useful: Collections, Notifications, and Offline support. Collections are just bookmarks, which all browsers do for free. Notifications are pointless, because all of the pages are on Github; you can subscribe to notifications there (but why would you even want to??). And I approximately never need to use MDN when I'm offline. We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result. EDIT: Buyer beware, I just signed up for the plan, and all it does is add a "Feedback" menu item that links to https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback … but that's a public repo. Anyone can file an issue there. I certainly did, and I'm not happy about it. https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43 https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43 There's no Discord, no forum, no mailing list, no scheduled upcoming fireside chat… just a public Github repo where you can file an issue and hope for a response.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
Who is left on the team that can help paying folks work through web related questions? As I understand it the MDN team only exists to manage user contributed content. So you can book a call to talk to some project managers about how they convince people to give free content I guess? Or put another way, why wouldn't you just pay money directly to the content creators who are putting stuff on MDN? These are likely the folks making patreons, paid courses, etc. and are the subject matter experts you'd want to engage.
MaxLeiter 5y ago
I can imagine notifications being useful if you’re waiting for a browser to add a feature or something

amatecha 5y ago

Nice, now can they finally stop taking money from Google? :) "The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year." "Mozilla's long-term plan is to build its own revenue streams from subscription-based services and reduce its dependence on the Google search deal" <-- I guess MDN Plus would be one of those subscription-based services! [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

ronyfadel 5y ago
Not even close. Even if they get 100,000 paying monthly users in the first year, that’s only $6-12M/yr.

lowercased 5y ago

The long descriptive post ends with "We invite you to try the free trial version or sign up today for a subscription plan that’s right for you." But... no sign up button. Two of the internal links point to more info on features, which have a different menu at the top with a 'get mdn plus' button. I guess that's how you're supposed to get it? Just surprised they felt the need to avoid putting a sign up link on the blog post. Yes, that's a bit rude, I know.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Yeah, I looked several times for an actual link to MDN Plus and couldn't find it.
altano 5y ago
Same here, took me a solid 5m to find a way to sign up. Add a link the announcement blog post and the FAQ, Mozilla.
lowercased 5y ago
HEY - look at that - thanks for adding the links at the bottom of the post MDN :)

dzogchen 5y ago

I was sitting on the train yesterday, when I opened a tab with a page from MDN that was already loaded. It quickly jumped to 'cannot connect' even though I didn't refresh. I wondered why it did that, but it makes perfect sense now. Now I use Zeal[1] to still have the documentation available offline. [1]: https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/

KyeRussell 5y ago
There are explanations for that that aren’t as nefarious as what you’re implying.

rsstack 5y ago

Subscribed. Would love if the $10/user/mo plan included shared collections for the entire team.

Darmody 5y ago

I wish they put some effort into making Firefox better. To me, lately Firefox has been a pain in the ass to use. Regular silent updates that forces me to restart the browser and close all my work. Saving my session doesn't always help to continue working where it was interrupted. The latest change to the downloads is horrible. Sometimes my work requires me to download hundreds of files that I only want to open with some software for several seconds, then dismiss it. Now instead of being able to open it directly from the browser, I have to watch how everything is saved in my downloads folder and then waste my time deleting all those files manually. I'm not paying them any money. I don't want to waste my money only to see their executives getting richer without anything in return.

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scim-knox-twox 5y ago
I'm using FF only because there are no other options for me (I've tried). I miss old Opera.
- Darmody 5y ago
  Same here. To me it's starting to feel like Windows several years ago. Features that don't bring anything new to the table but pushes their own agenda. I've been using linux for years now and I can't be happier but I can't find a replacement to Firefox. FF is so good that even it's being sabotaged it's better than all the alternatives. Sadly the engineering behind a browser is no joke and I don't think anybody else will create or work on an alternative to Webkit/Blink.
quesera 5y ago
> The latest change to the downloads is horrible. about:config browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel false ...will revert to the old behaviour.
- Darmody 5y ago

stmpjmpr 5y ago

There's a "Get MDN Plus" at the top of the MDN pages. Link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus

999900000999 5y ago

Why does everything need to be a subscription. Sell me a product, like a JavaScript book or some merch. Or just put up the donation link. I do want to give y'all money, but a recurring subscription is too much.

akvadrako 5y ago
Yeah, automatic subscriptions are terrible. What if you stop using it for a few months or years? Do you un and re subscribe each time? You'll need a spreadsheet to keep track of all these things. A lifetime subscription for a few hundred bucks seems like it would make more sense. Or paying per use, like a cent per page. Easier for accounting and for peace of mind.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Love those lifetime subscriptions, or ones that at least let you do more than 1 year up front but not on auto-renew.

codazoda 5y ago

Sailing is a long-time dream that I probably won't be able to realize in my lifetime. But, if I did ever go sailing, I would need something like parts of MDN downloaded. Doing computer work is what I love and I'm sure it's what I would use my spare time for. Clearly this has usefulness far beyond that niche case, but I love the idea that Mozilla has found a really useful thing to charge for. I hope that they can be successful with it.

subpixel 5y ago
Just a note to assure you that while sailing you will spend all of your time maintaining the systems that keep the rigging and electricity in working order. Any time you have left over will be spent researching which other boat you should get.

BeeKeeper 5y ago

If you want to support MDN, donate to OpenWebDocs.org. That supports open web content documentation on MDN for everybody. Personally, I have the repo locally, so Plus isn't tempting. But if it adds something that is of value to you, giving money to mozilla isn't a waste I don't think. That said, Open Web Docs is a good investment. I think it's even tax deductible, but either way, it can be written off as a business expense.

bdlowery 5y ago

I'd pay if I could get the old theme back.

pipeline_peak 5y ago

I think Mozilla should switch back to their old dinosaur mascot, it seems more relatable than ever.

peteforde 5y ago

Dear MDN: Congratulations on the launch. I hope that your best days are ahead. Thanks, from the bottom of my cynical heart, for the thousands of times you've told me exactly what I needed to know.

efficax 5y ago

Would be great if they had an enterprise level so i could get my work to buy this for us

mpolichette 5y ago

MDN docs are the best... they should monetize via high level articles and example implementations for systems. For example, the webRTC docs are great and explain a lot about how it works... however, there is very little information about good patterns for including it in your application. I bet people would be happy to pay for guides like that, I would.

nabaraz 5y ago

I don't need any of MDN plus's features. Just give me Firefox at $5/month without ads, pocket, sponsored news, telemtry, affiliate links and all the data collection.

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chatmasta 5y ago

Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this? In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.

spicybright 5y ago
I would love to see a solution like that. Or even if we could reliably tie a corporation to pay a fixed amount if they use free software would be nice.
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  You won’t find a satisfactory solution to this under the economic model they operate within
  - theteapot 5y ago
    Taxes are real. I even read about them in a modern economics text book.
rswail 5y ago
Google "contributes" whatever they are paying to Mozilla every year. The reason Mozilla exists is to maintain "plausible deniability" in terms of anti-trust for the other browser "vendors", which used to be IE, but is now Chrome(-ium).
zdragnar 5y ago
Their biggest competitor is a major, no?

koprulusector 5y ago

Subscribed (to the Supporter plan @ annual)

ramesh31 5y ago

This makes my soul hurt.

clairity 5y ago

> "In 2020 and 2021 we surveyed over 60,000 MDN users and learned that many of the respondents wanted a customized MDN experience. They wanted to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them." in 2022, i really hate this "users told us" phrasing, because it's always misleading, and even normative at the margin. users didn't tell you anything, you inferred that from, here, a single survey (and that's more pretext than most provide). left to our own devices, users express feelings first and foremost, even if formulated reasonably. it's almost always ad hoc rationalization, because most users don't care enough to think deeply enough about your product in that moment of inquiry. you have to elicit and infer what they value, and there are plenty of quantitative (marketing) techniques these days to do so, but that takes real work and forethought. this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over, and it's naive at the very least. it's also how you get a product feature list that most people here (potential customers and customer advocates) seem to feel is lackluster and are even mocking. with all that said, i find this offering at least closer to something i'd pay for than something like pocket or vpn. there are tons of value-added features that mozilla can offer on top of a browser and web dev that no one else would really want to tackle. they just need to do some real market research, rather than larp'ing it. (i really should start a product blog just to catalog all these silly things.)

cxr 5y ago
> i really hate this "users told us" phrasing[...] this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over Except that's a made up quote. That phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the part you lifted from the blog post (the thing that's an _actual_ quote) or any other part of it.
- clairity 5y ago
  talk about a "whoosh"! sometimes we characterize a phenomenon with a succinct phrase that's meant to represent more than the literal quote.
  - cxr 5y ago
    That's not a "whoosh". I know what you were doing. (And it's a rotten thing to do—not least of all because your fake quote changes so much that it differs substantially in a way that your comment is not even relevant to what they actually wrote.) Don't make up quotes. It's against the rules. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789>

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Good to see them working on reasonable ways to monetize and support continued development and maintenance

galaxyLogic 5y ago

Why doesn't MDN go the Stack Overflow route and allow people to ask questions and even answer them and curate it all?

Rapzid 5y ago

I don't feel anyone should need to personally "donate" to MDN or feel compelled to out of some sense of moral obligation; or any other reason for that matter. This isn't a donation per-say, but many on here seem to not care one iota about the features but still express a sentiment to want to "donate".. The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much delegated documenting how to develop against the browser platform to MDN. Microsoft explicitly I believe? This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO. This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. How 'bout some blog posts about how you plan to get Apple, Microsoft, and Google to foot the entire bill for the operation?

Aeolun 5y ago
> This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. Always starts like that, but once they have enterprise subscriptions I can make a case for onboarding 100s of developers at a time.
ochoseis 5y ago
> This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO. Any entity will tailor the value it provides to the desires of its benefactors. So, if you would like MDN content focused on AMP, ads, and the metaverse, then this sounds like a good approach.
- gfxgirl 5y ago
  All of those companies want knowledgable developers as well as helping their own developers. They have enough incentive and self interest to fund MDN without having them focus on corp products.
drstewart 5y ago
Is there anything the internet believes people should pay for that Apple and Google shouldn't? I think at this point people have balanced the entire global government budget + all consumer spending against a handful of tech company's balance sheets. It's funny nobody does this against less visible but equally powerful companies. I don't hear anyone claiming Cargill should be funding open standards ag tech. Literally populism.

polote 5y ago

> Collections: Find what you need fast with our new collections feature. Collection is a feature we see in more an more knowledge sharing tools. Biggest user of that feature today is probably pinterest. The two usages that you can use them for is curation and quick retrieval. If you strip the collaborative part (curation) then YOU JUST reinvent bookmarks. Congrats mdn

prokopton 5y ago

Why is it region-locked? I'm in Japan—looking at the English page—and the Plus page says it's not available in my region.

Aeolun 5y ago
That was my first question as well. Guess they can’t deal with the tax implications?

thekoma 5y ago

That's all well but I actually preferred the previous style of the MDN Docs website.

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giancarlostoro 5y ago

MDN is literally the documentation for everything front-end web that is built-in to browsers and a little more. I hope all of the income from this goes back into MDN. If there's a project that deserves my eternal gratitude, MDN is up there as a web developer. Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on MDN or contributed at any capacity.

skissane 5y ago

> Today, MDN Plus is available in the US and Canada. In the coming months, we will expand to other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)

mstade 5y ago

Wait, so you mean to say I can pay $50 a year for high quality documentation that is eminently useful in my day to day work, and I get things like notifications when said content changes? And on top of that, I’ll be supporting free access to said content to those who might need it he most, like kids learning to program or rookies just starting their careers? AND it’s tax deductible? Pfft, shut up and take my moneys please! I have no need for any of the stuff in the supporter plan but even at $100 a year this is a total bargain. I know I don’t have to pay for it, but with the amount of value I’ve gotten out of MDN over the years it’s a steAl. I’ll buy this as soon as am back at my laptop. I have no analytics to support it, but I swear !mdn is my most used DuckDuckGo shortcut. I’m signing up as soon as I’m back at my laptop.

spacexsucks 5y ago
Same. I have been using MDN for 15 years.
tdy_err 5y ago
Let's hope that money will actually get recycled into MDN and not just into the CEO's $3+ million salary.
- deleted 5y ago
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