[HN Gopher] MDN Plus
___________________________________________________________________
MDN Plus
Author : sendilkumarn
Score : 387 points
Date : 2022-03-24 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hacks.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hacks.mozilla.org)
| codazoda wrote:
| 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.
| rsstack wrote:
| Subscribed. Would love if the $10/user/mo plan included shared
| collections for the entire team.
| stmpjmpr wrote:
| There's a "Get MDN Plus" at the top of the MDN pages. Link:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus
| subpixel wrote:
| 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]
| Darmody wrote:
| 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]
| scim-knox-twox wrote:
| I'm using FF only because there are no other options for me
| (I've tried).
|
| I miss old Opera.
| Darmody wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > The latest change to the downloads is horrible.
| about:config
| browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel false
|
| ...will revert to the old behaviour.
| Darmody wrote:
| That's the first thing I did. It doesn't revert to the old
| behaviour.
| mpolichette wrote:
| 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.
| impalallama wrote:
| what ever makes mdn sustainable going into the future
| mplewis wrote:
| 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.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I guess firing many staff didn't really save them a lot in the
| long run then.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| 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
| reitanqild wrote:
| You can donate to Librewolf if you want I think.
|
| I think I might already have done.
|
| And I can send more if they start to go beyond Firefox and
| start fixing the things Mozilla have torn down.
| [deleted]
| blowski wrote:
| https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/
| reitanqild wrote:
| That money cannot go to Firefox, only to cute projects and
| insane (IMO) CEO wages.
| ngokevin wrote:
| I don't think money is the issue with $500M coming from
| Google per year.
| jefftk wrote:
| This doesn't go to the Firefox team. It supports the Mozilla
| Foundation, but Firefox development is funded by the Mozilla
| Corporation.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| 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.
| aldebran wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I would use this instead
|
| - Devdocs
|
| - Zeal on Linux and Windows
|
| - Dash on mac
| throwaway123808 wrote:
| I believe these all rely on MDN under the hood for their web
| docs
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| All of those have offline browsing, which would be a part of
| MDN plus.
| BeeKeeper wrote:
| 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.
| chatmasta wrote:
| 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.
| mminer237 wrote:
| If W3C or WHATWG try to "tax" Google, Apple, or Microsoft to
| participate, they will lose all significance the next day as
| big tech starts their own exclusive group to define web
| standards. They completely control all influential browsers.
| Whoever makes the implementations gets to choose the standards.
|
| Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement
| power.
| chatmasta wrote:
| So put the governments in charge of the standards committees.
|
| I would personally never advocate for that, but it's a
| potential solution.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The standards organisations don't have any authority to do
| that, and why should they? Who's mandate would they be
| operating under?
| spicybright wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You won't find a satisfactory solution to this under the
| economic model they operate within
| theteapot wrote:
| Taxes are real. I even read about them in a modern
| economics text book.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Their biggest competitor is a major, no?
| bartread wrote:
| I agree. I have no critique of Mozilla for charging, but it's
| pretty infuriating that big tech calls the shots, contributes
| so little, and thus puts the rest of us in a position where we
| have to pay for the privilege of access to documentation of
| APIs that they define (and churn[0]). These companies really
| are the pits.
|
| _[0] Of course, my other bugbear here is that this constant
| churn adds non-trivial quantities of non-value-adding effort to
| my roadmap and backlogs. Again, individuals and smaller
| companies pay the price for big tech 's high-handedness. Not
| cool._
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| If you take a follow the money perspective to understanding
| this frustrating behavior, you can see plainly that it is
| systemic and the only behavior to expect out of the economic
| model these companies operate within. These are not
| individual bad actors
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| codeptualize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KindAndFriendly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zepearl wrote:
| (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 :)
| com2kid wrote:
| > Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences
| that you had with Svelte so far?
|
| Sveltekit was a bit of a pain to get running, but using
| svelte itself has been insanely nice. I got an entire
| internal website up and running with a bunch of cool
| functionality in ~3 days. The state management with Redux
| alone would have taken that long if I was using React.
|
| Being able to just use regular HTML is also nice.
|
| There are some gotchas, how it handles CSS is kinda weird,
| and docs beyond the basics are rough in places.
| zepearl wrote:
| Thank you! :)
| KindAndFriendly wrote:
| Pros: - Very easy to learn. If you know TS/JS+HTML, there are
| ~ a handful new syntax expressions to learn, but otherwise
| you're good to go. - Easy to integrate an external CSS
| framework such as bootstrap - Built-int TS support. Being
| able to use types in your frontend code is delightful. Cons:
| - The generated output puts the vast majority of the content
| in the JS files (vs having a least some skeleton or so in
| HTML).
| Melatonic wrote:
| How useful is this? I have never actually used it
| Melatonic wrote:
| 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.....
| dzogchen wrote:
| 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/
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This makes my soul hurt.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| Well written and updated documentation is hard to find these
| days, like the Arch Linux Wiki
| greatgib wrote:
| 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!
| ibejoeb wrote:
| 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.
| maxloh wrote:
| You can use devdocs.io
|
| It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it
| is open source.
| cellshade wrote:
| You can grab the full repo with the content here:
| https://github.com/mdn/content
| beardedetim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wget?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| 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.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Httrack?
| bdlowery wrote:
| I'd pay if I could get the old theme back.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I think Mozilla should switch back to their old dinosaur mascot,
| it seems more relatable than ever.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Am I an outlier or does their head of product not really appear
| to have a bead on what developers actually want?
| aldebran wrote:
| 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.
| sendilkumarn wrote:
| 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:
| andrew_ wrote:
| 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.
| barrenko wrote:
| There is some space to earn money by providing "curriculum" for
| self-taught devs.
| kingcharles wrote:
| All these features are available using other existing tools. This
| is just a nudge to donate to a worthy cause.
| dend wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1]: https://devdocs.io/
| mminer237 wrote:
| Notifications for new web standards/implementations is actually
| something I wanted this morning, but I just went to
| https://caniuse.com and added its news page to my RSS reader.
| chronogram wrote:
| That devdocs as a PWA is really handy, thanks.
| bluedays wrote:
| Think of it as an easy way to donate to Mozilla
| acdha wrote:
| Or, better, for your employer to do so. It's really hard to
| get permission to donate money at many large organizations
| but if the CIO kicks in $20k/year for support, training, etc.
| the accounting department won't even blink.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Re: notifications I think it's a smart move. Back when I was
| content lead for 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 wrote:
| 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-
| node...
| dfabulich wrote:
| 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 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 ... 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| peteforde wrote:
| While we all are allowed to have our own reasons for signing
| up, my reason had exactly nothing to do with unlocking magical
| paywalled features and everything to do with putting my money
| where my mouth is to support this incredible resource.
|
| I have personally derived massive value (time, money, effort)
| from MDN and will do anything I can to help ensure it outlives
| me and my petty interests.
| [deleted]
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| I can imagine notifications being useful if you're waiting for
| a browser to add a feature or something
| nabaraz wrote:
| 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]
| politelemon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's a real shame that they threw away Firefox Send. It
| would've been a great addition to that bundle.
| nathancahill wrote:
| The legal liability was too much to stomach. Look at the
| lawsuits against Mega.
| flatiron wrote:
| 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
| hbn wrote:
| I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to
| documentation for web development.
| 2143 wrote:
| 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
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| 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-
| go...
| l30n4da5 wrote:
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| faffernot wrote:
| 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.
| peteforde wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Love those lifetime subscriptions, or ones that at least let
| you do more than 1 year up front but not on auto-renew.
| efficax wrote:
| Would be great if they had an enterprise level so i could get my
| work to buy this for us
| jacekm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I find the regional availability odd for a product like this.
| What could be the reason? Maybe payment processing, or i18n?
| koprulusector wrote:
| Subscribed (to the Supporter plan @ annual)
| lowercased wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, I looked several times for an actual link to MDN Plus and
| couldn't find it.
| altano wrote:
| 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.
| daveidol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My early April Fools prank detector is going off. No?
| Nicksil wrote:
| No. Why would this be an April Fools prank?
| jraph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| mrzimmerman wrote:
| 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.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| But hey, I'll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An MDN subscription is probably a better number on a chart
| somewhere, if that's what you really care about supporting.
| jefftk wrote:
| 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!
| tomp wrote:
| But also keep in mind that you'd be funding an organisation
| that supports censorship.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| I'd appreciate a pay-what-you-want option. (I still subscribed
| for $50 annual because you called me out, promise I'm not
| shilling!)
| chefandy wrote:
| The only 3rd party requests I see on their pages are Google
| analytics and a CDN'd js lib. _Hell yes_ I 'll throw them some
| cash if they'll keep their core product free for folks who
| don't use it often/can't afford it. I'd love to see them get
| rid of google analytics even, but compared to most it's pretty
| clean.
|
| What pisses me off is when someone like a newspaper will start
| charging AND keep 4 TB of tracking garbage every single page
| load. Get lost.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Subscribing to MDN Plus does not support Open Web Docs, which
| is the organization that does the funding for
| creating/managing the content for the free product.
|
| If you want to support the free product, donate directly to
| Open Web Docs: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
| chefandy wrote:
| Much appreciated.
| 0des wrote:
| Get rid of GA.
| chefandy wrote:
| Agreed. Considering how much they put into usability, they
| should be able to get enough data without third party
| tracking involved at all. That said, perfect is the enemy
| of good and I'll give them credit for being good--
| especially considering the norm.
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| BeeKeeper wrote:
| OpenWebDocs is focused on MDN/CanIUse browser compatability
| data AND MDN content. Many people who used to work for moz on
| MDN now work with them. OpenWebDocs.org
| paxys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is no way to donate to MDN directly. You can only
| donate to the Mozilla charitable foundation which is not
| related to MDN.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| Donations are all fine and dandy, but there are some
| problems:
|
| - Getting people to donate in a recurring fashion is
| exceedingly hard. Not impossible (as some patreons
| prove), but still hard.
|
| - Getting businesses to donate at all, let alone in a
| recurring fashion, is even harder.
|
| mdn needs money, not just for content, but to keep the
| lights on. Their content is furthermore aimed largely at
| "professionals" (and some enthusiasts), meaning
| convincing businesses to give money is even more
| important than e.g. is the case with wikipedia or your
| random youtube content creator.
|
| Businesses are easier to convince to spend money if you
| offer them something in return. Doesn't really have to be
| much or something particularly valuable, just something,
| anything really, that then can be used to justify the
| expense to management/comptrollers/legal/owners as a
| "valid" expense.
|
| I personally had people contact me in the past, on more
| than one occasion, saying they made good use of some code
| I open sourced in their commercial stuff, and they'd like
| to gift me something, but they cannot get permission from
| their employer to transfer any funds unless I formally
| enter a "consulting" contract (and NDA and yadayada) or
| officially sell them something. So the best they could do
| is offer me some company swag and/or a small donation out
| of their own pocket. So now I own a bunch of T-Shirts and
| coffee mugs from various companies :P (and I am OK with
| that, since I never had the intention to profit from that
| code).
|
| So creating some easy "premium features" may indeed
| enable mdn to collect more money, especially from
| businesses, compared to them just asking for donations.
|
| It remains to be seen if that will work for mdn, and if
| mdn will then use the money "wisely", but I really cannot
| fault them for their approach so far...
| duxup wrote:
| Sad truth is nobody wants to pay for anything and when they can
| they'll just complain.
|
| I think we as internet users are as much a part of the 'you're
| the product' and 'free for life .. oh never mind' ecosystem
| because most of the users on the internet won't respond to
| anything else.
| peteforde wrote:
| Speak for yourself.
|
| I was signed up within 90 seconds of seeing the announcement.
| That's not intended to be virtue signalling, just one
| anecdotal datum - and I'm confident that there are many, many
| people who feel the gratitude I feel.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Are they going to rehire all the dedicated editors and staff
| they laid off?
|
| Or is this really just charging money for all their now open
| source contributed content...
| danShumway wrote:
| There's no way to win.
|
| 1. Entity donates resources to maintain a resource for free,
| while pulling in revenue from an unrelated source => they're
| beholden to that unrelated source and it's unsustainable, we
| shouldn't take them seriously.
|
| 2. Entity scales back to maintenance of that resource =>
| they're abandoning what made them great.
|
| 3. Entity re-monetizes the resource more directly => what are
| they monetizing, they don't do anything to maintain it.
|
| What people want is an instantaneous jump to:
|
| 4. Entity already has resource monetized and is already
| significantly maintaining that resource.
|
| But a company in position #2 can't just jump directly to #4.
| It's fair to ask about the direction that a company is going
| and whether or not they'll follow up, but sometimes I feel
| like critics want teleportation, not movement.
|
| ----
|
| Mozilla is pretty clearly still investing into MDN (both in
| ways that I really like such as the learning areas, and in a
| few ways that I'm less thrilled about, like a few recent UX
| decisions). But if MDN plus allows them to continue that
| investment, it's worthwhile -- ideally, if they make enough
| money off of it, we might see them increase that investment.
| If there's evidence that they're not going to, then fine, I
| guess, but I don't really see that evidence.
|
| What MDN Plus offers is basically what people have been
| asking for with Firefox except for MDN. It's direct funding
| for the product itself.
|
| I'll also point out that providing a platform for permissive-
| licensed content is itself important work and should be
| supported. It is good that this content is permissively
| licensed, and alongside MDN plus, we can actually look at
| permissively licensed donated content as a way of "funding" a
| public resource. If the content wasn't permissively licensed,
| my feelings about that would be _very_ different, but this
| isn 't a scenario where people are donating resources to
| Mozilla that only Mozilla can use and that are then kept
| captive -- people are donating content that anyone can use
| and that anyone can modify and re-host, it's remaining in the
| control of the community.
|
| That's not to say that we shouldn't try to get to #4 again,
| but an MDN without a ton of professional editors is still
| worth funding. Particularly given the contribution model,
| where if you really want to pay for editors you can just go
| hire editors yourself and pay them to contribute to MDN.
|
| This reminds me a bit about the conversations about
| Wikipedia. I have tons of criticism about Wikipedia and tons
| of criticism about how it fundraises, but one of the
| criticisms I don't have is that it has too much money.
| Wikipedia is one of the most important resources on the
| entire Internet and it's good for a project like that to be
| _over_ -funded. Similarly, I think MDN is one of the most
| important educational resources for Javascript on the entire
| Internet, and I don't really see the problem with giving it
| more money, even if all that was happening with that money
| was that it was being dumped into server resources or making
| the owners feel more comfortable about it.
| danShumway wrote:
| I do want to re-state, not as a way of shutting down
| conversation but as a legitimate idea that might not be a
| terrible thing for people to pursue if they feel strongly
| about it:
|
| You could pay people directly to contribute to MDN if you
| wanted to and if you got enough people together to pay a
| salary. An org could do that, someone could have a Patreon
| where a bunch of people drop them a monthly salary to
| devote X hours a month to editing MDN articles, there are
| lots of ways of funding that kind of content from
| professional or at least high-quality writers.
|
| It'll still go through the normal contribution process, but
| the beauty of this being permissively licensed is that you
| don't necessarily need Mozilla itself to give people money
| to contribute content. We're not in the same situation as
| people donating content to, say, Reddit or Goodreads, where
| much of that content won't actually be accessible to the
| community depending on what the company decides to do in
| the future.
|
| And again, I don't bring that up as a "why are you
| complaining, just fix it yourself" argument, it's
| legitimately a thing I would support if there were serious
| efforts in that direction. If it's something you really
| care about and feel confident about and you have a drive in
| that direction, it would probably be helpful to have
| community-paid editors for MDN.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| This is a "what about ... " response.
|
| The only important thing is if they are going to invest in
| new staff in the future. The old staff almost certainly have
| new jobs in new companies.
|
| Let's not move the goal posts. Having reason to invest in
| enhancing documentation, and creating a viable revenue stream
| by doing so is a good thing, even if decisions in the past
| are regrettable.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| No the "we'll pay for it!" comments were in the context of
| the staff being let go and departments spun down. We meant,
| we'll pay to keep this high quality content going.
|
| No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around
| for a year, convince people to just give free content for
| funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec
| bonuses can keep getting higher.
|
| We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about a high
| quality web. That Mozilla appears to be long dead.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| When people said "we will pay for it" the decision had
| already been made, it was too late.
|
| Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it's
| still available. They are pay-walling features that make
| it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs
| offline.
|
| There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal,
| and Dash, if you want similar features but don't want to
| pay Mozilla.
|
| You are not losing anything you already can access to my
| knowledge.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| Neither. As the article specifically mentions, they will not
| be charging for the existing open content, or any future
| changes or additions to it. Why you would try to suggest they
| might do this is beyond me.
|
| They will be selling additional "premium features" at launch
| time, as described in this article, and plan to sell
| specifically created additional content, like in-depth
| articles, in the longer run, as described in previous
| articles.
|
| Maybe this will enable them to hire back some of the people
| they let go (assuming these people are willing). But the main
| goal is to put mdn on a level of funding where little or no
| funding from mozilla is required anymore.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _Why you would try to suggest they might do this is
| beyond me._
|
| Cynical take: because reading is hard so people just don't
| do it, and see "MDN" in the title so take this as their
| chance to scream into the void about whatever tangentially
| related nonsense they care about today.
| ary wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'll pick up a subscription. MDN is valuable and anything that
| helps keep the content free is valuable.
| reitanqild wrote:
| I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway.
|
| The big question is:
|
| Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I
| consider) insane exec salaries?
| yunohn wrote:
| > but I am tempted to pay anyway > Does the money go to
| Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane
| exec salaries?
|
| Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox
| to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.
| dudus wrote:
| The money goes to wherever the foundation think it's going to
| be more valuable. It may be engineer salaries, C-Level
| compensation or just sit at a bank as a reserve.
|
| You don't get a saying how money is spent by any non-profit
| if you donate it. If you don't agree with how the non-profit
| spends their money don't donate.
| geodel wrote:
| What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how
| much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for
| Mozilla everyone has to work for free?
| gruturo wrote:
| OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and
| developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current
| execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to
| mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved
| salaries while they butcher the company all the way down.
|
| So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the
| funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes
| to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative
| accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset
| the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings),
| and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and
| possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I
| won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
| paxys wrote:
| The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are
| paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay
| market rates then you aren't going to get competent
| leadership to manage organizations at that scale.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| People like only certain things about Mozilla, most of
| which aren't due to execs. Firefox being well engineered
| (and not having meddling pointless features such as
| "Colorways") and up on the latest standards, good
| engineering representation in browser standards from a
| non-Google, and MDN. That'll do. Oh, and Rust, but the
| execs already did for that.
|
| Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.
|
| And that's why people are worried about where the money
| will go.
| paxys wrote:
| So, good engineering things are not because of execs.
|
| Bad engineering things are all because of execs?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| No idea. But the things I care about are detailed and
| engineering-related. Execs shouldn't exist by default.
| Even if I couldn't point to anything bad they've done,
| that's not enough activation energy to require them.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Generally, yes. That is the allegation. If you don't
| agree with that fine, but I'd imagine alot of engineers
| would agree with that in general with their experience in
| industry. Let alone Mozilla.
| geodel wrote:
| Yes, that would be revelation. Engineers saying engineers
| are right, doctors saying doctors are right.
| fleddr wrote:
| Looks like if you do pay market rates, you still get
| execs running a company into the ground. The high salary
| comes with the expectation of results.
| [deleted]
| ummonk wrote:
| They didn't get competent leadership though...
| silisili wrote:
| Currently seems paying market rates and not getting
| competent leadership, so something seems amiss.
| geodel wrote:
| Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary
| condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff
| competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not
| guarantee projects' success at all.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Ah yes, FireFox's issue is they're paying Execs below
| market rate.
|
| If they want to get better market share they should start
| paying more!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| #Ol...
|
| ---
|
| Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their
| poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market
| performance"?
| Melatonic wrote:
| I agree with that but I see 90% of the time people just
| complaining about the high salaries. As much as those
| salaries may seem ridiculous the Bay Area is a very
| competitive place and I do not see many competent execs
| taking a massive downgrade in compensation just because
| they may believe in Firefox on principal.
|
| That being said poor performance is for sure something to
| criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about
| competing with some of the largest and most entrenched
| companies on earth - not an easy job.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| But Mozilla's revenue and market share went down since
| the drastic increase in execs' pay. Would that be
| acceptable in a for-profit company?
|
| The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is
| that it's Google's fault, because they changed their
| sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And
| then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if
| there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to
| square 0.
|
| I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was
| done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from
| sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give
| to Mozilla any money since that change happened.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?
|
| If their revenue went way up, absolutely. Which is what
| happened when the executives got more money.
| hu3 wrote:
| what revenue? Without Google's half billion dollars per
| year they are dead.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| In 2010 it was a tenth of a billion dollars. If any
| public company went from revenues of $120 million to $560
| million executives would unquestionably get a raise.
|
| And then when the revenue goes down to something like
| $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO
| stepping down and the number of executives getting cut.
| Like what happened with Mozilla.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Are you serious? What company or organization works like
| this? With goal posts like this, you've got the perfect
| excuse to never donate any money to them.
|
| How do you give an organization money, and ensure that
| _that specific dollar_ doesn 't go to the execs? Any
| money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way
| or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to
| pretend they don't exist.
| piaste wrote:
| Do you apply the same rigorous standards to all your
| purchases?
|
| Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a
| travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single
| cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly
| underserved salaries while they butcher the company all
| the way down"?
|
| Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy
| to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of
| Nestle, Nike, etc.?
|
| (EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to
| purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but
| would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's
| understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities
| than to sellers.)
| worik wrote:
| I spend as much of my time, and as many of my resources,
| as possible away from those horrid greedy bastards.
|
| I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about
| becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not
| good. Our system where huge resources go to a self
| selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the
| crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it
| as I can.
|
| I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have
| to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I
| do not.
| ummonk wrote:
| > This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN
| Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would
| purchase it solely as a donation, then it's
| understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities
| than to sellers.
|
| I would bet you that most people are in the latter group,
| not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such
| services from ordinary companies, as I don't see
| sufficient value in them.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| No they need to pocket 8 million dollars and fire
| developers, absolutely
| rzzzt wrote:
| Maybe somewhere between the two extremes?
| cnasc wrote:
| Does Mozilla pay their software developers an industry-
| standard TC?
| pc86 wrote:
| It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about
| $120k, so yes.
|
| The national median software developer salary is
| something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like
| $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're
| already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already
| very high up in general.
|
| I say this because people on HN love to pretend that
| "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k
| for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-
| level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k
| TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
| cnasc wrote:
| I don't think it's unreasonable to compare the take-home-
| pay of a Google engineer working on Chrome to that of a
| Mozilla engineer working on Firefox. That's a good peer
| comparison to make.
|
| It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla
| engineer's pay to an average brought down by body-shop
| CRUD operations. They're really not the same industry.
| sciurus wrote:
| > It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about
| $120k, so yes.
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's
| much too low.
|
| The figures at
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-
| Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla.
|
| You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for
| Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?com
| pare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that
| Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.
| sendilkumarn wrote:
| That definitely feels a bit low. Is this considering only
| US or worldwide?
| pc86 wrote:
| It's the US median salary. If you're outside of SV and
| NYC, as a new grad you're looking at $60-70k, with no
| bonus and no stock (because outside of tech 99% of
| companies don't give their employees stock until they're
| at the director/VP level).
| flyingfences wrote:
| Outside of SV/NYC, that's not low at all.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400,
| 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
|
| Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome.
| Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.
| 0xJRS wrote:
| ralmidani wrote:
| Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not
| picking on Mozilla), I think it's hypocritical when non-
| execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would
| make at a for-profit because "our mission!", while execs
| justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they
| could make at a for-profit. Shouldn't executives be
| __more__ committed to the mission?
| ygjb wrote:
| I always wonder at the thought process behind these
| questions.
|
| Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a
| regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about
| transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane.
|
| Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or
| business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of
| entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what
| portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up
| contributing to _just the feature or service you like_ as
| opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that
| the organization supports?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase
| or business they make to this degree?
|
| If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would
| probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink
| "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing
| the events and paying for staff than doing anything else.
| Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.
| dsr_ wrote:
| It's idealism. We still hope, despite the evidence, that
| Mozilla can be unadulteratedly good, as long as we only
| look at the open source side of it.
|
| We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and
| Oracle are evil.
| Vinnl wrote:
| It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When
| you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent
| to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do
| you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to
| ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| But we have a lot of control over the software we use on
| a daily basis, and there are _several_ capable browsers.
| I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy,
| is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for
| many. If it doesn 't, they want to know so they can
| change it. Food is a little more complicated in that
| regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand
| tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.
| SECProto wrote:
| For this to be an accurate comparison, there should be
| two free sources of peanut butter, one that I want to
| donate to because it helps keep the peanut butter playing
| field level, while the other has a massive majority of
| the peanut butter market and uses that to do various
| anticompetitive things. But the one I want to support
| doesn't accept donations, only the parent conglomerate
| does.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| If they said you could donate on top of the jar price to
| help the poor third world peanut farmers, and you did so,
| and then found that money went to the CEO's salary and a
| rebranded PeanutVPN product, and then the Peanut Butter
| CEO justified it by saing that Mark Zuckerberg and Satya
| Nadella get paid a lot so it's not fair if they don't,
| would none of that that annoy you?
| Minor49er wrote:
| > Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase
| or business they make to this degree?
|
| Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an
| idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it
| comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this
| case with Mozilla.
| fay59 wrote:
| The difference with other services is that what people want
| when they subscribe to Spotify is access to music. What (at
| least some) people want when they subscribe to MDN Plus is
| ensure that Firefox and other open Web projects stay
| relevant. If people paid for Spotify merely so that Spotify
| stayed relevant, they would probably care in similar
| measure how Spotify spends its money.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I don't see how claiming that Mozilla is insane helps
| this cause.
|
| I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to
| attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason
| by propaganda.
|
| If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the
| open web with these comments then that makes both my
| brain and heart hurt.
| mpolichette wrote:
| I think these questions come from the idea baked into
| charitable giving. When you purchase a good, the thing
| you're getting is obvious, it is what you're purchasing.
|
| However, when you're giving to charity, what are you
| getting? You probably want to know.
|
| If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of
| this by creating classic ladders which encourage more
| contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of
| their donation" goes.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I'm really unhappy with how much money Spotify is pumping
| into podcasts because I really want them to give that money
| to musicians instead (I don't listen to podcasts)
| adfm wrote:
| They're not podcasts if they're behind a paywall. They're
| commercial shows that happen to benefit from the
| conflation. They are broadcasts and you are right to be
| concerned when a company supposedly selling commercial-
| free access to music starts providing anything beyond
| music.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase
| or business they make to this degree?
|
| If you are giving charitable donation to the Mozilla
| Foundation, it is entirely reasonable to ask what they use
| that money for.
| danShumway wrote:
| Hopefully it goes to MDN. I do wish there was a way to fund
| Firefox directly, but I hope that MDN plus resources are for
| MDN, not Firefox.
| nialv7 wrote:
| Mozilla laid off most of the MDN team in 2020 [1], then
| shifted the responsibility of updating MDN from Mozilla to
| the community [2], then created the Open Web Docs
| organization to take over the job of funding MDN [3].
|
| And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not
| optimistic about this.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]:
| https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-
| docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-
| open-web-docs-to...
| danShumway wrote:
| I already replied to this kind of logic elsewhere
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257), but I
| don't see the logic of looking at Mozilla cutting support
| for a program then introducing a way to fund that
| program, and responding to that by saying, "why should I
| fund something that's seeing cuts?"
|
| Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you
| describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to
| Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like
| is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox
| directly, not for the money to come from a different
| critical web resource.
| sirwitti wrote:
| Same for me, I'd love to get a subscription for Firefox!
| ankit70 wrote:
| I pay for pocket subscription just for this.
| _jal wrote:
| > Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what
| I consider) insane exec salaries?
|
| Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon,
| Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting
| choices before deciding to do business with them?
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and
| (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
|
| > Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google,
| Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal
| budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?
|
| Mozilla is a lot more like a charity than an actual
| business, and people _do_ ask questions like that about
| charities (e.g. how much of a donation will go to admin
| overhead vs program work is often reported for them).
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| But do other vendors ask me to use their product out of a
| sense of altruism?
|
| I don't know how many appeals I have seen asking me to use
| Firefox to help preserve the open web.
|
| When they are asking you to behave altruistically, it is
| your right to ask about their behavior as well.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google,
| Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal
| budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?
|
| It's a very common question when you give money to a non-
| profit, which Mozilla is.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Mozilla Foundation is non profit. Mozilla corporation is
| for profit.
|
| Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the
| corporation according to public records.
|
| Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp
| leases it, funneling money around.
|
| Statements are public.
| Nitramp wrote:
| Mozilla corporation is fully owned by the foundation
| though.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| While what you're saying is factually correct, my biggest
| pet peeve is that Firefox is entirely owned and developed
| by the corporation. If I donate money to Mozilla, it ends
| up with the silly projects instead of the browser.
|
| To me, this is a problem, and while it's documented
| _somewhere_ , it's not nearly communicated well enough on
| their website when you're actually making a donation. As
| a matter of fact, it's sometimes even downright
| misleading.
|
| As such, I don't believe the corporate structure is a
| healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly
| aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make
| the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations
| go to.
| dangoor wrote:
| When you say "Mitchell Baker owns it all", you aren't
| claiming that Mitchell owns Mozilla Corp, are you?
| Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation, as described
| in the Wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
|
| Most Mozilla employees draw their salary from Mozilla
| Corp.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Who owns the foundation?
| dangoor wrote:
| No one. It's a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
| Vinnl wrote:
| And that question being common is exactly why many non-
| profits have focused on reducing "overhead", actually
| making the organisation less efficient, because having
| e.g. medical workers do their own administration doesn't
| get listed as overhead, whereas hiring a secretary does.
|
| With charities in general, it'd be better if people
| focused on results more, rather than on how resources are
| being allocated. Luckily, that idea has been gaining more
| and more traction, e.g. GiveWell.
| worik wrote:
| I do not do business with them where I can help it
| karaterobot wrote:
| It seemed like the person you're responding to was asking a
| rhetorical question that responded to the original
| statement ("here's your chance to put your money where your
| mouth is"), not directing a question at Mozilla itself.
|
| As a response to that prompt, it's a completely legitimate
| question to ask: would my money actually be going where I
| want it to go?
|
| Anyway, I think people do ask themselves where the money
| they spend goes. They do that all the time. It's the basis
| boycotting different businesses. They don't ask it in every
| case, such as when the question has been answered already,
| or where there isn't ongoing controversy about how money is
| being spent.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Normally, no, obviously!
|
| But this is a special case IMO -- Firefox is something
| people care _very deeply_ as they view it as a crucial
| bastion of the free and open internet.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| If they were nonprofits working for the good of humanity,
| and yet had exponentially increased their executive
| salaries over the last five years while market share went
| down, then yes.
| shkkmo wrote:
| From: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-
| docs-...
|
| > Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla.
| Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these
| additional funds into open source projects contributing to
| MDN but it is still in early stages.
|
| > A subscription to MDN Plus gives paying subscribers extra
| MDN features provided by Mozilla while a donation to Open Web
| Docs goes to funding writers creating content on MDN Web
| Docs, and potentially elsewhere.
|
| It's not totally clear to me after a little research, but I
| think MDN is part of the corporation, not the foundation?
| (It's isn't listed as on the foundation website as one of
| their projects.
| selectnull wrote:
| I will. As soon as they allow me to pay, because I do not plan
| to move to US or Canada.
|
| > 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.
| wnevets wrote:
| Does anyone else dislike the recent redesign? Is there anyway to
| switch back?
| clairity wrote:
| > "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.)
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