Thank You MDN

MDN statement a few hours ago: &quot;MDN as a website isn&#x27;t going anywhere right now. The team is smaller, but the site exists and isn&#x27;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.&quot; [0]<p>There are tech writers from Google and Microsoft that contribute full-time to MDN. (And it&#x27;s a wiki, after all, anyone can edit it!)<p>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.<p>You can be sure that the site will find a new home if Mozilla defunds it further. It certainly won&#x27;t drop off the web.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MozDevNet&#x2F;status&#x2F;1293647529268006912" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MozDevNet&#x2F;status&#x2F;1293647529268006912</a>

In my opinion, MDN should be the first result of search engines when searching for web related stuff. No offense to w3schools, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ve improved their content a lot, but I hate that I have to add &quot;mdn&quot; on my search phrase.

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

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 &#x2F; 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.<p>Maybe a subsidiary would better serve it and we can all put money directly towards MDN. I know there are people who don&#x27;t trust Mozilla out there who might be more inclined to give to at least MDN.

I know it&#x27;s a bit pedantic, but it&#x27;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).<p>I realize it&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s core tech (not politics) well enough?<p>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.

Subsets of MDN docs are archived for offline downloads monthly by Kapeli (the team behind the Dash docs browsing app): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapeli.com&#x2F;mdn_offline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kapeli.com&#x2F;mdn_offline</a><p>I&#x27;m not sure where this leaves Kuma (current)&#x2F;Yari (future) frontend work, which makes a deeper mirroring of MDN difficult to figure. I&#x27;m not sure if there&#x27;s an equivalent to, say, MediaWiki&#x27;s XML dumps.<p>The CC-BY-SA content licensing can be an obstacle as well, because the attribution is &quot;Mozilla Contributors&quot; or &quot;MDN Contributors&quot; but links to the history... which is obviously complicated should MDN disappear completely.

MDN and Caniuse are responsible for billions of my customers&#x27; end users not seeing JS errors in their consoles.<p>Web APIs are fucking cray.

Mozilla&#x27;s announcement said, that the COVID-19 situation was responsible for them to restructure the company.<p>Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla&#x27;s revenue to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or in fact has been benefited from COVID situation.<p>Did the donors stop funding Mozilla or are they just using COVID-19 as as a scapegoat?

To any of the laid-off Mozilla tech writers, Tails is hiring a technical writer:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tails.boum.org&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;technical_writer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tails.boum.org&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;technical_writer&#x2F;</a><p>There may be some other technical writer jobs on FOSSjobs or at FOSS companies:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fossjobs.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fossjobs.net&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;resources" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;resources</a>

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.<p>I ask that Mozilla think about having the option for a monthly subscription model. No extra features for paying (e.g $5&#x2F;month for Firefox), but at least as paying users we will know that it&#x27;s helping to support the open web and the survival of Mozilla as a whole.

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?

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

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

I&#x27;m 2 weeks into learning programming and I couldn&#x27;t imagine life without MDN. It&#x27;s fantastic.

MDN is more important than Firefox actually.<p>If a fundraise is needed to keep it evolving, bring it on.<p>Or google&#x2F;microsoft big guns can do something about it? after all they will be benefited from this too.

I tried to comment on the actual page but disqus is somehow broken for me. So I&#x27;m just gonna say it here:<p><pre><code> 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??</code></pre>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donate.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donate.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;</a>

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.

If we just hadn&#x27;t cancelled Eich because he once gave $1000 to a cause that isn&#x27;t in vogue, the internet might actually have two popular browsers.<p>Instead we have a CEO who is destroying Mozilla while profiting handsomely.<p>But at least she is woke.

Currently, there are zero results when searching these comments for &quot;specification&quot;. It&#x27;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 &quot;gold standard&quot;, and conversations like this one include dozens of references to W3Schools and zero references to W3C. Sad.

Pragmatically speaking, is there a comparable alternative to MDN right now, dealing with the same scope, breadth and authority? I don&#x27;t think so. You would think the supergiant corporation which keeps saying they want an open, standards-compliant web would&#x27;ve created something like this by now, but it fell to a non-profit&#x27;s lot to do the really valuable but under-appreciated work (writing &amp; updating documentation).<p>MDN cannot be allowed to fail or million of Web devs will suddenly find their error rate increasing noticeably. If Mozilla corp can&#x27;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?

Who&#x27;s behind this site? I don&#x27;t see any credits in the footer or an about page, and the `whois` record is vague and scant on details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;who.is&#x2F;whois&#x2F;ilovemdn.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;who.is&#x2F;whois&#x2F;ilovemdn.org</a><p>Is the OP behind it? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peterbe.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.peterbe.com&#x2F;</a>

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.<p>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.

So true, and I think it&#x27;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.

Man, I hope MDN never goes anywhere. I&#x27;ve pinned a tab of MDN on my web dev machine&#x27;s default browser, next to npmjs.com. As far as I&#x27;m concerned, it is <i>the</i> documentation for the 3 main open web technologies, and I know many would agree.

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

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.

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

Is there a google sheet where people can put themselves as &quot;available for hire&quot; like in other lay offs of the past?

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

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

MDN and thanks Mozilla for making it.

What&#x27;s MDN?

MDN is great and I&#x27;m thankful that it exists.<p>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.