
Thank You MDN - peterbe
https://www.ilovemdn.org/
======
paulirish
MDN statement a few hours ago: "MDN as a website isn't going anywhere right
now. The team is smaller, but the site exists and isn't going away. We will be
working with partners and community members to find the right ways to move it
forward given our new structure at Mozilla." [0]

There are tech writers from Google and Microsoft that contribute full-time to
MDN. (And it's a wiki, after all, anyone can edit it!)

But yes, very sadly, the Mozilla tech writers that maintain the docs, maintain
them, and keep those browser compat tables running so smooth... were part of
the layoffs.

You can be sure that the site will find a new home if Mozilla defunds it
further. It certainly won't drop off the web.

[https://twitter.com/MozDevNet/status/1293647529268006912](https://twitter.com/MozDevNet/status/1293647529268006912)

~~~
goldenManatee
This is mind blowing. Those docs are the gold standard for creating so much of
the web. Does their management understand the gravitas (that word is warranted
here) of what it means to lay-off parts of the team in charge of setting,
keeping, and raising the bar for creating so much of the internet? This is
truly alarming and saddening that some MBA exec who’s in the role because
they’re “a people person” and “get tech” is deciding the fate of creating for
the internet.

~~~
stu2b50
Of course. It's a necessary sacrifice. That money will go on to support the
livelihoods of the most vulrenable and needy of the Mozilla team, namely the
C-suite.

"She actually responded to my question about her salary in a q&a and said it
was too much of a financial burden to ask of the c-suite to cut their salaries
down to $500k“

[https://mobile.twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/129323209098...](https://mobile.twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/1293232090985705478)

Could you imagine a chief something officer only making 500k? They'd be
laughed out of the country club, which is against the Geneva convention.

~~~
merpnderp
You should start a business and when you need execs you could just pay them
what you think is fair, and with the money you save you’ll dominate the
competition. Maybe everyone in the world will notice the key to your success
and exec pay will be reduced.

~~~
bscphil
You think you're making a point here, but there's a mistake in your reasoning.
You're thinking that "fair" pay is whatever allows you to beat the market, and
since if Mozilla only paid its c-suite $300k-$500k, it would not (you think)
be able to compete with other companies with high paid execs, this proves that
whatever they're paying the execs now must be fair.

But ... "fair" pay does not mean the same thing as "whatever is financially
best for the company to pay its employees". Take the other end of that
bargain: is it fair for Mozilla to pay their janitors a reproduction level
wage? Most of us (except the hard core right-wing libertarians) say no, that's
why we have a minimum wage (which many of us also think is too low).

The elision of the distinction between "fair" and "whatever the market rewards
you for doing" isn't an argument, it's just crass market-worship.

Edit: this post is pretty clearly argued, and downvoting without even a
comment is exactly the kind of ideological nonsense that this site
simultaneously prides itself on not doing (contra Reddit), and yet hilariously
symbolizes.

~~~
Feolkin
I wish the site would just get rid of downvotes. Your post is constructive and
well-written, doesn't say anything egregiously offensive and isn't trolling
and doesn't lack effort. The only reason why you're being downvoted is because
some people don't agree on an ideological level. Which is bullshit. You can
still respect people who don't share your views, and I wish the site cared to
foster that kind of community, instead of promoting another echo chamber.

~~~
cabalamat
> The only reason why you're being downvoted is because some people don't
> agree on an ideological level.

That's not true, I downvoted the past because it complained at being
downvoted.

~~~
Feolkin
And you're just as much a part of the problem. You're blindly punishing him
for pointing out that the system is unfair und his post is not and was not
deserving of downvotes. It has nothing to do with the content of his actual
comment. You're not contributing positively in any way. You're just
reinforcing that anybody who speaks out or has a different point of view isn't
welcome here.

~~~
jessaustin
Downvoting complaints about downvotes is an attempt not to have to read
complaints about downvotes. But here's another: please don't complain about
downvotes!

------
b0afc375b5
In my opinion, MDN should be the first result of search engines when searching
for web related stuff. No offense to w3schools, I'm sure they've improved
their content a lot, but I hate that I have to add "mdn" on my search phrase.

~~~
petepete
I use a Firefox keyword to directly search MDN, simply so I can avoid
W3Schools who always occupy the top spot in results.

For those who aren't aware, right click any search box and select 'Add a
keyword for this search', set it to something short and then in your URL bar
type: "<keyword> <search term>". So to search MDN for the span element I'd
type "mdn span".

------
dawnerd
It better stay around, w3schools finally started to fall off in Google
results. I feel dirty anytime I accidentally click on it.

~~~
whoisjuan
w3schools might not be the canonical and authoritative source for web
technologies documentation but sometimes I find the most straightforward
answer there.

They don’t deserve the hate they get. What people seem to hate from w3 is how
light and loose they go about things, potentially opening some lanes for bad
practices.

But they have improved a lot throughout the years. Also people don’t seem to
acknowledge how hard is to create non-verbose documentation. I can’t imagine
the amount of effort that it takes to trim all the fat and still produce
something useful.

I almost get the feeling that people who hate w3schools, simply hate the
concept of a resource that is trying to make easy what is by nature pretty
hard.

I guess that’s how great singers feel about autotune.

It’s this idea that if you can’t consume the raw, hardcore documentation then
you’re not worth it of using that technology.

~~~
Fej
A lot of the w3schools hate probably comes from the "old days" when a lot of
the documentation was inaccurate.

~~~
edoceo
That was me. W3Schools has gone from good to crap back to good again.

It looks like an organization that fired all's the vanity-metric chasing PMs
and is coming back to "first principles"

~~~
eitland
Isn't it just one or a couple of guys in Stavanger, Norway?

Edit: 5 employees according to this: [https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-
data-as/sandnes/it-kons...](https://www.proff.no/selskap/refsnes-data-
as/sandnes/it-konsulenter-og-rådgivning/IG7JIK103DC/)

Not everything needs to be big :-)

~~~
nerdponx
Which begs the question: how does W3schools do it, while Mozilla can't?

~~~
eitland
There's a huge difference (order of magnitude) between the size of those
projects.

And I'm saying that as someone who'll admit to having been critical of Mozilla
in the last two days.

------
giancarlostoro
This is one website that like Rust requires its own foundation much like what
happened with the Thunderbird mail client. This would be a great chance for
Microsoft / GitHub to swoop in and maintain one of the more invaluable
resources on the internet. I treat MDN like gospel when looking up anything
front-end web related because it is usually spot on and based on reality.

Maybe a subsidiary would better serve it and we can all put money directly
towards MDN. I know there are people who don't trust Mozilla out there who
might be more inclined to give to at least MDN.

~~~
bamboozled
Is there a reason why this can’t be a group of volunteers who run it, or even
those developers spin off their own foundation who would take donations ?

~~~
manquer
it is wiki and they do welcome edit contributions. Until now there was no
need, I don't think anyone thought Mozilla is not up to the task of
maintaining it. I would happily donate to a foundation independent of Moz
dedicated to maintaining MDN.

~~~
giancarlostoro
This is something else I've thought about cause I don't know if a subdisiary
of Mozilla is guaranteed to not have its finances pillaged by the parent.

------
basilgohar
I know it's a bit pedantic, but it's disturbingly ironic that a site dedicated
to show love to a free and open web development resource implores folks to
express that love via a propritary comment platform (Disqus).

I realize it's an independent labor of love, and perhaps evidence of the broad
appeal of MDN, but I am so disappointed with how the pendulum of web features
has swung so heavily back towards centralization again.

~~~
smichel17
Mozilla sits on this weird fine line between free and corporate culture.

~~~
hutzlibu
That line is very blurry.

------
jeswin
How does Mitchell Baker, who has a BA in Chinese studies and a Law Degree,
know which divisions to axe? Mozilla is a deeply technical company doing work
on compilers to internet standards - does the CEO understand the company's
core tech (not politics) well enough?

Mozilla was actually founded under similar circumstances. I hope engineers who
work on the core product (and those who were let go) are talking about another
reincarnation of Firefox - from the same code base but with different
leadership.

~~~
geofft
She's been with Netscape since 1994 and remained a volunteer for Mozilla after
the 2001 layoffs. She was one of the people who _founded_ the Mozilla
Foundation in 2003 and has been with them ever since. Meanwhile, the degree in
Chinese studies is from before C++ or TCP/IP even existed, so I'm not sure
what you expected her to learn in college instead that would have helped her
run a company doing compiler development and internet standards.

There are valid criticisms you can make of Baker (see the compensation issue
discussed elsewhere in these comments) but "She has the wrong degree" doesn't
seem like one of them, unless you think that Mozilla _engineers_ \- the people
doing the deeply technical work - must be required to have a CS degree.

~~~
jeswin
My point is that since Mozilla is a technology product company, she will have
to rely on advice (from within Mozilla) to make the most important strategic
decisions for the company. As a CEO, that's a huge handicap.

Mozilla needs a CEO who can understand its technology and its partners
(developers) at a very fundamental level. Mozilla needs a Lisa Su.

~~~
adamsea
> She's been with Netscape since 1994 and remained a volunteer for Mozilla
> after the 2001 layoffs. She was one of the people who founded the Mozilla
> Foundation in 2003 and has been with them ever since.

That sounds like pretty solid technology industry experience for an exec, no?

~~~
hu3
Not necessarily. Her experience very much depends on her positions there.

For example in my tech related company, the HR folks know little beyond Word
and Excel despite some having worked for years there.

What were her roles up to now?

~~~
geofft
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker)

President and founder of the Mozilla Foundation 2003 onwards, and also
previously CEO of the Mozilla Corporation 2005-2008. Also she wrote the
Mozilla Public License before that. I suspect she knows a little bit more than
Word and Excel.

Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute, or for-
profit vision, or something. There's lots of criticisms that can be actually
substantiated. The hypothesis that she doesn't understand what Mozilla _is_
requires significant evidence. It's entirely possible a Mozillian could show
up and say that actually she's been a clueless and politically savvy leader,
but outsiders speculating that she can't possibly be qualified need to provide
more than speculation.

~~~
jeswin
> Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute ...

I am well aware of her tenure and good work at Mozilla (from public sources).
The argument I was making was that the failure to execute is correlated with
not understanding technology well enough. Certainly not claiming that's the
only factor, but it might play a part in it.

How will you make expensive long-term bets otherwise? The proof is in the
execution, or the mis-execution.

1\. Mozilla retired Firefox OS in 2016/17\. And in a couple of years, a fork
of it (KaiOS, which shares 95% of the same code) gets pre-installed on upwards
of 80 million (probably more) units. It could have been a lot more if the OS
was better; it really had a shot at low-end phones and TVs.

2\. If the team says they need to commit tens of millions of dollars and half
a decade or more to create a new, safe programming language for browsers and a
prototype - will the CEO approve? And if yes, wouldn't it have been entirely
based on advise from others in the room?

3\. The world needs an efficient browser engine for multi-core devices coming
with bundled GPUs. Requires nearly a decade to get right - how does one commit
to that unless the complexity (and not just the rewards) are fully understood?

4\. The failure to sell the Servo vision (safety, multi-core) to device
manufacturers ultimately rests on the CEO. Instead, the Servo team got axed.

Every technology company needs a CEO who deeply understands the technology.

~~~
adamsea
Sunda Pichai was a material engineer without a CS background and then joined
Google as a product manager.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai)

So unless I’m missing something he does not have a CS background or software
engineering experience, and, presumably, was yet able to acquire at least some
understanding of computing.

------
trynewideas
Subsets of MDN docs are archived for offline downloads monthly by Kapeli (the
team behind the Dash docs browsing app):
[https://kapeli.com/mdn_offline](https://kapeli.com/mdn_offline)

I'm not sure where this leaves Kuma (current)/Yari (future) frontend work,
which makes a deeper mirroring of MDN difficult to figure. I'm not sure if
there's an equivalent to, say, MediaWiki's XML dumps.

The CC-BY-SA content licensing can be an obstacle as well, because the
attribution is "Mozilla Contributors" or "MDN Contributors" but links to the
history... which is obviously complicated should MDN disappear completely.

------
codezero
MDN and Caniuse are responsible for billions of my customers' end users not
seeing JS errors in their consoles.

Web APIs are fucking cray.

~~~
oaiey
You made my cray day better! Love it.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Mozilla's announcement said, that the COVID-19 situation was responsible for
them to restructure the company.

Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue
to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or
in fact has been benefited from COVID situation.

Did the donors stop funding Mozilla or are they just using COVID-19 as as a
scapegoat?

~~~
peterbe
It has nothing to do with donors. The less people use Firefox to search Google
and click ads on that, the less money Mozilla gets. 90% of the revenue depends
on that. When nobody can even go to vacation destinations, they won't click
those hotel/travel ads.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
Doesn't Mozilla get paid for search traffic, rather than Ad-conversion from
that traffic[1]?

Although Google's ad revenue has dropped 8.1% in Q2 2020 when compared to same
period last year[2], I don't think people 'searched less' due to COVID-19 on
Firefox, Google trends shows search has indeed increased, but rather these
Search Engines might have cut down their deal value for search traffic.

[1][https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-
gives-m...](https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-
mozilla-more-money-to-push-privacy/)

[2][https://fortune.com/2020/07/30/alphabet-earnings-googl-
stock...](https://fortune.com/2020/07/30/alphabet-earnings-googl-stock-
shares-q2-2020-ad-sales-revenue/)

------
pabs3
To any of the laid-off Mozilla tech writers, Tails is hiring a technical
writer:

[https://tails.boum.org/jobs/technical_writer/](https://tails.boum.org/jobs/technical_writer/)

There may be some other technical writer jobs on FOSSjobs or at FOSS
companies:

[https://www.fossjobs.net/](https://www.fossjobs.net/)
[https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources](https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources)

------
alfiedotwtf
Now that we know that Firefox is in danger (and by extension the open web), we
as a community must now vote with our wallets - let Firefox fend for
themselves and be overtaken by a monoculture, or support Mozilla financially.

I ask that Mozilla think about having the option for a monthly subscription
model. No extra features for paying (e.g $5/month for Firefox), but at least
as paying users we will know that it's helping to support the open web and the
survival of Mozilla as a whole.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Donate here: [https://donate.mozilla.org/en-
US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

Hire Mozilla to be your VPN here:
[https://vpn.mozilla.org/](https://vpn.mozilla.org/)

Those are actionable ways to support them right now.

~~~
alfiedotwtf
Me personally donating isn't going to make any difference, but put a
"subscribe" UI as part of the regular interface so a big group of people pay
each month, then I'm happy for them to take my money.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Subscribe to the VPN then.

~~~
xxs
Yay, I need a VPN to subscribe to the VPN that I had no need for.

I'd be absolutely ok to have yearly subscription for Firefox that ensures no
braindead UI changes are shoved down.

------
maps7
I posted a message saying we should support Mozilla. I have read through this
thread and now I am doubting the leadership of Mozilla. In particular, I am
annoyed that I ever donated to Mozilla when the execs are taking home
MILLIONS. Is there any browser to support or use that is not run by
millionaires?

~~~
Santosh83
There are many many shallow forks of Firefox, Chromium or Webkit out there.
Some prominent examples are SeaMonkey, Pale Moon, Basilisk, QuteBrowser,
Falkon, Gnome Web, IceCat, Ungoogled-Chromium.

They're all superficial forks though. Without progress on the core engine etc
upstream, they won't be able to keep up for long. On the other hand, there is
little reason to think any of the three major engine efforts (Gecko, Webkit,
Blink) are going to stumble any time soon.

~~~
The-Compiler
qutebrowser, Falkon and Gnome Web aren't forks of anything, they use a well-
defined and maintained API.

For qutebrowser and Falkon, that's QtWebEngine, which you could call a fork of
Chromium I guess - but it's more of a stripped-down Chromium with a stable API
on top and a couple of patches. QtWebEngine is maintained by multiple people
employed full-time by the Qt Company:
[https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine](https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine)

For Gnome Web, that's WebKitGTK, which is an official WebKit port (i.e. part
of the upstream WebKit repository maintained by Apple and others) and also has
been actively maintained for the past 13 years or so.

------
gorgoiler
MDN is fantastic. It has some of the best cross linking I’ve seen in
documentation, with many of the specific APIs having excellent links to more
general topics and class overviews. It makes it both a reference work, and
source of learning too.

MDN’s low ranking on Google searches was part of my continuing breakup with
Google. Boo! They should know better!

------
kapilkaisare
If MDN did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

------
ajm-codes
I'm 2 weeks into learning programming and I couldn't imagine life without MDN.
It's fantastic.

~~~
franey
I'm over a decade into web development, and I still reference it every week.
Last week I thought I should start a blog post about how, for me, it's the
single best resource on the web. I sure hope it stays that way!

------
ausjke
MDN is more important than Firefox actually.

If a fundraise is needed to keep it evolving, bring it on.

Or google/microsoft big guns can do something about it? after all they will be
benefited from this too.

------
t0astbread
I tried to comment on the actual page but disqus is somehow broken for me. So
I'm just gonna say it here:

    
    
      MDN is such an important resource for me! I have never seen any documentation as detailed and helpful as MDN, not just for web development but in general. How does life without MDN even work??

------
jasonhansel
[https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

~~~
nerdponx
I'm starting to feel like it's good money after bad.

~~~
aslfksdfl
Would you rather they stay the same and die as a company? They've just made an
incredibly hard choice.

~~~
kgraves
Perhaps they should stand on their own two feet and deliver products that
people would pay for.

I am surprised they didn't consider charging Firefox Enterprise for companies.

------
jbirer
Mitchell Baker needs to be laid off as Mozilla survived without her quite well
and the MDN team brought back. Just because she feels a 500k salary is beneath
her is no excuse to ruin the most valuable Web technologies documentation on
the Internet.

------
sam_goody
If we just hadn't cancelled Eich because he once gave $1000 to a cause that
isn't in vogue, the internet might actually have two popular browsers.

Instead we have a CEO who is destroying Mozilla while profiting handsomely.

But at least she is woke.

------
subsection1h
Currently, there are zero results when searching these comments for
"specification". It's shocking how few programmers nowadays refer to the
source material. During discussions on the CIWA newsgroups back in the 90s,
everyone referred to specifications, DTDs and RFCs. On HN in 2020,
regurgitations are considered the "gold standard", and conversations like this
one include dozens of references to W3Schools and zero references to W3C. Sad.

~~~
jolux
Programming has grown enormously as a discipline since the 90s (not to mention
the tools of the web themselves) and the specs are kind of a pain to read. I
read them when I want an answer to an extremely specific question (what does
the spec say about internal implementations of JavaScript objects?) but when I
want things like API overviews it’s just faster to have high-quality secondary
sources.

~~~
cesaref
Back in the 90s it was assumed that specs would be written in a specification
language, and we'd be able to prove our software by automated testing using
the pre/post conditions.

We'd mainly spend our time writing UML and thinking back to the bad old days
when writing software was using old fashioned text editors like vim and emacs,
and we'd be wondering how those fools managed to get anything done.

Meanwhile back in reality, it's the same old.

~~~
jolux
Haha. I was only born in ‘98 so I guess I’ll never know the feeling. Proud
Emacs user myself.

------
Santosh83
Pragmatically speaking, is there a comparable alternative to MDN right now,
dealing with the same scope, breadth and authority? I don't think so. You
would think the supergiant corporation which keeps saying they want an open,
standards-compliant web would've created something like this by now, but it
fell to a non-profit's lot to do the really valuable but under-appreciated
work (writing & updating documentation).

MDN cannot be allowed to fail or million of Web devs will suddenly find their
error rate increasing noticeably. If Mozilla corp can't spend on it, maybe
they can spin it off into an independent foundation the community can donate
to and keep running, like say the Linux or Apache foundation?

------
jermier
Who's behind this site? I don't see any credits in the footer or an about
page, and the `whois` record is vague and scant on details:
[https://who.is/whois/ilovemdn.org](https://who.is/whois/ilovemdn.org)

Is the OP behind it? [https://www.peterbe.com/](https://www.peterbe.com/)

------
dependenttypes
I would love to leave a comment in that page but sadly they decided to use
Disqus. My issue is not even that it is proprietary (which is a big issue) or
that it sells your data (which is again a big issue) but rather that it does
not let me log-in.

Along with Firefox, Thunderbird, Rust, and Servo, MDN was one of the best
projects from Mozilla, it is sad that they decided to fire people that worked
on it.

------
sgt
So true, and I think it's important for developers to look up documentation on
sites like MDN (consider it sites that are authorities on a subject) rather
than blindly googling and ending up on sites that have a massive variety in
quality. I see that all too much.

------
wilsocr88
Man, I hope MDN never goes anywhere. I've pinned a tab of MDN on my web dev
machine's default browser, next to npmjs.com. As far as I'm concerned, it is
_the_ documentation for the 3 main open web technologies, and I know many
would agree.

------
scotty88
MDN is one of those rare websites that I search for explicitly as a prefix to
a query

------
JacobJack
No disqus account. So I’ll express myself here... MDN is an invaluable source
of information. Very clear, comprehensive articles with intuitive examples.
The web needs that.

------
jampola
Last week I just started refreshing myself with Django using the MDN
resources. To say the docs are great would be an understatement.

------
maerF0x0
Is there a google sheet where people can put themselves as "available for
hire" like in other lay offs of the past?

~~~
zaxu
mozillalifeboat.com

------
pts_
MDN is my go to site for web-dev documentation.

~~~
max23_
Same, "MDN" is always part of my web dev search query.

------
vs2
Is there a list of people looking for roles from Mozilla? I would love to hire
a technical writer!

~~~
mikro2nd
How may writers contact you?

------
random_dork1
MDN and thanks Mozilla for making it.

------
Trias11
What's MDN?

~~~
jml7c5
From Wikipedia:

>MDN Web Docs, previously Mozilla Developer Network and formerly Mozilla
Developer Center, is the official Mozilla website for development
documentation of web standards and Mozilla projects.

Essentially an online reference manual for HTML, JavaScript, the DOM, and
other web-related stuff.

~~~
GiantSully
have been learning modern javascript and look up documentation from MDN

------
nomdep
MDN is great and I'm thankful that it exists.

Having said that, I find the timing of this site very suspicious, as if it
were part of a secret PR campaign for improving Mozilla public image, after
the recents layoffs.

~~~
brundolf
The timing is almost certainly related, but I interpret it as the community
trying to voice how important MDN is to everyone in an effort to convince
Mozilla that it deserves priority, or at least doesn't deserve further cuts.

~~~
nomdep
I got it backwards then, thanks.

