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.
- Being a good technical writer. - Being some who learned the tool/platform rather than someone who built the platform.
It much harder to write a doc on something if you’ve never been able to look at it from an outside perspective.
> 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 :)
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.
For the older people here on HN, maybe you can relate to this: I remember back in the late 90s when the LAMP stack first became a thing. We can poopoo it now, but it's really easy to underestimate the effect that stack had on soooo many developers. Going from static HTML to a relatively easy, accessible, and CHEAP way for any poor developer/college student like myself to generate dynamic content felt nothing short of magical. Suddenly it was possible to create just about anything you could imagine.
There have been many improvements on ways to build web apps since those days, but I have never had that feeling of pure magic since. Until SvelteKit. It is a leap forward, IMO. The framework clicks for me, front end code, server side code, all in the same app, and in a way that from my view could not be easier to understand. It for me is that next leap forward.
Im going to guess, you could get to a very useable level with svelte in an afternoon or good weekend. LogRocket also has decent tutorials on Svelte.
It's an extremely simple framework, relative to other js-frameworks like react or angular (not saying they better or worse).
Reminds me a bit of Golang, you can get up and running in a day !
Bottom line: Definitely dive into svelte, i cant image doing js any other way these days.
EDIT: Definitely start with svelte instead of sveltekit (different animal)
YMMV :)
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.
For outsiders to show up with such strong opinions like yours, it feels... weird, at the very least.
"Open Web Docs receives donations from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Coil and others, and from private individuals. These donations pay for Technical Writing staff and help finance Open Web Docs projects. None of the donations that Open Web Docs receive go to MDN or Mozilla; rather they pay for a team of writers to contribute to MDN."
via https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...
I have no need for any of the stuff in the supporter plan but even at $100 a year this is a total bargain. I know I don’t have to pay for it, but with the amount of value I’ve gotten out of MDN over the years it’s a steAl. I’ll buy this as soon as am back at my laptop. I have no analytics to support it, but I swear !mdn is my most used DuckDuckGo shortcut. I’m signing up as soon as I’m back at my laptop.
Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on MDN or contributed at any capacity.
But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
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.
[1]: https://devdocs.io/
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-node...
If that's the value, why don't they lead with that and leave the rest out?
I don't see a way to leave a comment on my donation, unfortunately, so I came here and hit `ctrl+f donat`, in hopes of finding someplace to put my comment.. So. Hi!
Mozilla, please carry on with your primary mission and eschew common corporate strategies. I hope the dollars help. Godspeed! p.s. MDN Plus? No thanks..
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.
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.
[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.
Last I looked most of the browsers were open source and being funded in the 100s of millions of dollars.
Browser APIs change far less than the impression that most people have. (That impression is mostly the result of churn in what's fashionable on GitHub/Twitter this month, i.e. non-standards-based code from arbitrary projects that don't have anything to do with the browser except that they themselves are built to run in the browser.) Browser APIs are mostly cumulative.
The places where that isn't true are almost all experimental APIs. Arguably, these shouldn't be "advertised" within the reference to begin with—even before we ever consider the cost of keeping those pages up-to-date.
"Open Web Docs receives donations from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Coil and others, and from private individuals. These donations pay for Technical Writing staff and help finance Open Web Docs projects. None of the donations that Open Web Docs receive go to MDN or Mozilla; rather they pay for a team of writers to contribute to MDN."
via https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...
Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement power.
I would personally never advocate for that, but it’s a potential solution.
MDN is a wiki and maintained by innumerable contributors
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.
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.)
Except that's a made up quote. That phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the part you lifted from the blog post (the thing that's an _actual_ quote) or any other part of it.
sometimes we characterize a phenomenon with a succinct phrase that's meant to represent more than the literal quote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless i'm missing something that makes collections significantly different/better.
Only like two to three people used it for a while, before they left for other jobs.
Now no one uses it.
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.
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.
I don’t even use half of what amazon prime offers, but it feels like much better value for money to me.
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.
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.
But even when I have an internet connection, offline versions of most of these sorts of resources load considerably faster, mostly because I’m in Australia and these resources are normally hosted from America. My experience is that Americans that have always been in America and then travel to the other side of the world are consistently surprised at how slow the internet is away from the USA—and it’s all about latency, not bandwidth.
But I am compelled to admit that the performance angle is fairly negligible for MDN: it’s one of the extraordinarily rare sites that actually loads fast, with nearby TLS termination and content distribution and evidently nothing too outrageous in their coding so that it can consistently load to completion on my admittedly fast laptop from a cold cache and no open connections in well under two second, regularly under one.
It's much more useful for specific API docs rather than general "how do I do X" stuff but it's very nice. Helps that you don't have to deal with scrolling through stuff like web3schools.
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.
It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.
It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)
Now I use Zeal[1] to still have the documentation available offline.
And if MDN people are reading this: consider adding an "enterprise" option with centralized account management.
It's especially hilarious when their vpn products only available for select countries, but their vendor (Mullvad) accept purchases from all countries.
"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...
Collection is a feature we see in more an more knowledge sharing tools. Biggest user of that feature today is probably pinterest. The two usages that you can use them for is curation and quick retrieval. If you strip the collaborative part (curation) then YOU JUST reinvent bookmarks. Congrats mdn
The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much delegated documenting how to develop against the browser platform to MDN. Microsoft explicitly I believe? This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO.
This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. How 'bout some blog posts about how you plan to get Apple, Microsoft, and Google to foot the entire bill for the operation?
Are you sure about that? To use your example, Microsoft was one of the companies behind the launch of WebPlatform.org and the push to make it the vendor-neutral repository of documentation for Web browser tech. It eventually folded out of recognition that developer.mozilla.org was the de facto place for Web developers.*
Assertion: "When the WebPlatform.org effort folded, folks from Microsoft and elsewhere began redirecting their contributions to land on MDN."
How would you know if the previous statement were true or not? It's a collective work—formerly a wiki, and now managed through GitHub PRs.
Any entity will tailor the value it provides to the desires of its benefactors. So, if you would like MDN content focused on AMP, ads, and the metaverse, then this sounds like a good approach.
I think at this point people have balanced the entire global government budget + all consumer spending against a handful of tech company's balance sheets.
It's funny nobody does this against less visible but equally powerful companies. I don't hear anyone claiming Cargill should be funding open standards ag tech.
Literally populism.
Always starts like that, but once they have enterprise subscriptions I can make a case for onboarding 100s of developers at a time.
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.
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.
Too bad it isn't available here yet, I will definitely sign up when I can.
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.
Now they will do whatever to be a business!
- Devdocs
- Zeal on Linux and Windows
- Dash on mac
The big question is:
Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
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?
> 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.
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.
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?
Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.
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.
If you want to support the free product, donate directly to Open Web Docs: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs
Or is this really just charging money for all their now open source contributed content...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
What is a product other than a set of features? Especially in case of a paid tier on top of an existing free service.
My take is this isn't a paid tier. It's paid features, e.g. notifications. That's not to say it provides no value, but that there is massive value being unrealized.
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.
about:config
browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel false
I miss old Opera.
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.
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
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.
Treat this as an annual donation and don’t use the features. Seems like an easy solution.
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.
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.
Collections : looks like a good option but bookmarks should help right?
Offline : well :shrug: