
The entire Mozilla MDN team is laid off - ausjke
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1293264395603148802
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jdashg
"entire MDN _writers_ team" is a really important distinction, given the
misunderstandings in comments here and elsewhere.

It's tragic, but it doesn't mean MDN is going away.

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lightgreen
What’s the difference? Who is going to continue writing?

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jdashg
It's a big difference! People on HN have really come out of the woodwork in a
panic with plans to rehost them under the assumption it's getting shut down.

Paying for good dedicated writers is unfortunately expensive, but merely
hosting MDN isn't, and it isn't going anywhere.

Wikipedia still gets updated without core writers, but Mozilla's unrepaid
charity of producing quality webdev documents for Chrome users is at an end.

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lightgreen
Mozilla unrepaid charity does a large number of projects many times less
useful than MDN. At the same time, MDN is perfectly aligned with Mozilla
declared mission of making a better internet.

> hosting MDN

Outdated snapshot of MDN would become useless in several months.

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thevagrant
This is disappointing. I have tried to keep using Firefox and Mozilla
products. I had recently helped friends and family members switch from Chrome.
The recent layoffs and the awful rollout of the new Firefox on Android is
making me rethink this. MDN is an important resource, the content needs to be
maintained.

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toyg
You’re overthinking it. Mozilla and Firefox are not going anywhere, they’re
just doing some pruning - like they’ve done in the past and will likely do
again in the future, it’s just a business cycle.

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zaro
W/o over thinking it, Mozilla is in a death spiral, from which it can't
escape. It's just a matter of time.

With overthinking though, there is some hope left but you really need to
stretch your beliefs.

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toyg
In the worst scenario, if there is enough public interest to keep an
industrial-grade kernel afloat, there is enough interest to keep an
industrial-grade browser afloat. Firefox will survive Mozilla Corp like the
original Mozilla suite survived Netscape.

TBH I don't think we'll ever get there. Mozilla just need to refocus a bit.

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zamadatix
Possibly. The leading open source browser is currently Chromium though and its
components are already extremely popular in the developer world. Node.js uses
the V8 component. Electron, CEF, NWJS, and others use almost the whole thing
for embeddable applications. Firefox even uses a lot of the open source
components from Google like Skia. Many different companies and independent
teams maintain customized versions of Chromium that are anything from settings
customizations to large modifications.

So the question is not "is there going to be public interest to keep an
industrial grade browser afloat" it's "is there enough developer interest to
keep Firefox afloat when the thing that ate its lunch is open source".

And of course there are various levels of "afloat". Some forks of XUL Firefox
are kept "afloat" as in they still compile but have no modern security model
or major feature development.

The big thing though is open source developers never lost the opportunity to
help FF achieve webrender or e10s or Quantum or add HDR support. Mozilla
doesn't have to die before people can decide there is interest in keeping the
browser afloat but it has slowly been dying for years. The only major feature
I can think of that landed via community contribution was accelerated video
decoding on Linux. Maybe that will change if Mozilla does go away but it's not
a good sign it will lead to a truly "afloat" version.

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x0
Back to w3schools then I guess :/

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NetOpWibby
Oh hell nah

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holtkam2
That sucks. Any idea what will happen to MDN? (Maybe they can open source it?)

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racl101
Stupid question probably: how is the MDN team paying the bills?

