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.
"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...
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.
Isn't it time for new leadership or at least cut the leadership salaries and provide a bonus once the org is growing again?
The 2million / year salary - but no results and getting rid of people who add real value - is like an insult to those people who support / donate and root for Mozilla.
Mozilla is a mission driven org and for the CEO not to take a paycut to save some of those job losses - just looks very bad from an outsider's perspective.
Even if they were a legitimate software charity the money for those developers has to come from somewhere.
What if management wants to move away from web development and concentrate on satellite technologies like email and VPN?
Fixed it.
Edit: Dug up the tweet, the author of it posted an update, doesn't acknowledge the statement about the team being "smaller". I suspect it's not exactly a team anymore. https://twitter.com/jasnell/status/1293524408628203523
"Hi friends, Firefox Developer Tools will not be going away. We will be a smaller team and will share more details later when we have them."
I wonder if Mozilla is counting on the MDN people they just laid off to continue updating MDN, but on someone else’s dime?
New people besides Wil would come in and have absolutely no respect for community contributions.
eta: Also the generic/top-level !mdn search bang.
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".
For blocking pinterest on google, use https://pastebin.com/5diH8Weh
Remove pinterest and add w3schools to block them instead.
I would have to change this: CMD + SPACE -> safa (Open Safari) -> CMD + l (url bar) -> type: html forms mdn -> Click result
To this: CMD + SPACE -> safa -> CMD + l -> type: devel (auto completes to mdn) -> Click search bar -> type: forms -> Click result
There are five actions in the former, while 7 in the latter.
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.
I tend to avoid w3schools but this isn't at all the reason why. I don't believe that what w3schools provides is a made-easy resource for a hard concept. Actually I would say that's exactly what MDN is.
For the most part, I find that w3schools usually only provides a basic enumeration of the possible property values for an attribute or something like that with absolutely no additional insight whatsoever. I don't really believe that is helpful for beginners even in a pragmatic sense. Yet, somehow they continually peg the top of any HTML-related Google search.
MDN on the other hand almost surely details the most important caveats and practical aspects about whatever it is you're looking up. That I think is some of the most important information for beginners. It does not provide the same kind of "raw hardcore" documentation you'd get from reading the spec for example.
I for one, would like to know who does their SEO... they are often at the top of the results for many searches.
I think over time, that wrong information was less detrimental to learning, while still being here and there.
I met too many people over the years who started with w3schools and continued on, so it became clear my sense about it was mostly dogma - if folks turned lemons into lemonade and think fondly of it, who am I to yuck that yum :)
It's not the dictionary in terms of details... but it does have a lot more plain English explanations sometimes.
w3schools has its place alongside MDN, although I feel like MDN has been working hard at being a little more plain English these days / more examples.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-bloc...
> javascript date object
Top results contain MDN and W3Schools.com
> javascript date object -site:w3schools.com
Top results contain no w3schools.com
Example with pinterest. replace pinterest with whatever you want, like facebook, etc.
If it does the job, then why feel dirty?
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.
No, it wouldn't! I don't want yet another corp running MDN who might have their own agendas, or will be just as susceptible to reorgs and layoffs.
It would be great if Microsoft, Google, and Apple funded Mozilla to maintain and improve MDN. I like the idea of a "neutral" third party looking after MDN.
What they don't seem to have done is what I sort of assumed was going to happen: taken MDN, stripped the XUL stuff out of it and just airlifted it over, then make the now-duplicated MDN stuff just redirect to this new space and shifted their efforts there. I suppose the issue is getting consensus on doing that, a big move, from the MDN side but as Mozilla (at that time) was committing support to the new endeavor, I dunno, it just seems like the thing to do.
Instead they kind of had a weak period of double effort and nobody shifted over, and this just died.
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla needs a CEO who can understand its technology and its partners (developers) at a very fundamental level. Mozilla needs a Lisa Su.
But here's an example: Mozilla folded part of the Servo team into the Mixed Reality team earlier, and now they have been let go. Many people (incl me) thought that an efficient engine such as Servo will play a big role in the future of Mozilla, with devices going multi-core and apps with embedded browser engines (like Slack, Teams) becoming mainstream. And now, we're at a dead end. The quality of talent that was let go is stratospheric, as you can see from all the interest in hiring coming from various companies.
The whole thing has flopped and the browser has lost market share, and if I were Mitchell Baker I'd seriously question my ability to lead Mozilla. She can play senior roles in many companies including Mozilla, but not the CEO.
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.
Web APIs are fucking cray.
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?
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...
[2]https://fortune.com/2020/07/30/alphabet-earnings-googl-stock...
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://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
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.
First the CEO, and other executives, get 100% of their salary (millions $ per year). And if there isn't enough money to pay the developers then the community should pay them? No way. If there isn't enough money to run the company then there isn't enough money to pay such high salaries.
Hire Mozilla to be your VPN here: https://vpn.mozilla.org/
Those are actionable ways to support them right now.
If they let us decide which parts of Mozilla we wanted to support with our donation, then I would do it.
Why would I support mozilla, when they make donations on my behalf to the OPSEC of the so called radical left through riseup.net (So called because all these groups work in the interrest of american corporatism).
When Mozilla goes bottom up, and something new springs from its rotten carcass, then I will consider contributing financially to a free and open internet.
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.
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
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.
MDN’s low ranking on Google searches was part of my continuing breakup with Google. Boo! They should know better!
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.
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??Instead we have a CEO who is destroying Mozilla while profiting handsomely.
But at least she is woke.
They are not built for consumption by end users and it shows. They are mostly legal documents describing all the edge cases. They have ton of fluff. Near no usable example. Are super hard to know which browser has what.
And i could keep going. They are simply built for a different target. And it shows.
Hearkening back to the good old days is nice and all, but referencing the W3C is an interesting choice in a world where they've long since practically, and more recently officially, ceded HTML and the DOM to WHATWG.
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.
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?
Is the OP behind it? https://www.peterbe.com/
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.
>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.
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.