201–210 of 245 posts
>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…
Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing) alternative to MDN, https://web.dev . It's not a generalized web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web. The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant.…
Google also pays technical writers to contribute to MDN which we consider to be THE destination for reference documentation. Both Google and Microsoft have employed multiple fulltime techwriters to contribute to MDN for the last ~7 years, I believe.
We don't consider web.dev to be an alternative to MDN. web.dev doesn't do reference documentation, but rather guides, tutorials, and news. web.dev is developed by the Web DevRel team and you can be sure that everyone working on Web DevRel and Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser ecosystem. If there's anything we can do to make web.dev more inclusive, we'd love to hear it.
>But will we be well served by that in the long run? Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.
Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us for no apparent reason?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was a dogwhistle, not unselfconscious use of a loaded term.
" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24160874 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can tell you this makes me feel unwelcome, and makes me disappointed in our industry in general. Dog whistles are often very obvious, as is the case here. Not allowing any common-sense deviation from "always presume good faith" is absolutely ridiculous.
Rather sad the two proposals here are either "giant browser vendors should pay for it" or "independent web developers should pay for it." It's one thing for developers to pay for things that will develop their independent careers, but MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource; it's something developers constantly use at their jobs. Their employers , big or small, should be the ones paying for it. Of cou…
Open source versus closed source is not something a business cares about, but it's something employees care about. The price isn't terribly relevant either, nobody is exactly pinching pennies - my business trip per diem is higher than the donation cost above! But spend has to be justified. There needs to be a paid version with at least one functional change for a business to be able to sponsor it. We can bullshit all…
Perhaps a similar approach could work for MDN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…
The issue is that the mission Mozilla views itself as having and the mission many people want Mozilla to have are not the same. You can't trust someone to use your money wisely when your fundamental goals are clearly not aligned. At that point your only options are to restrict how donations can be used or to not donate at all.
I'm more or less resigned to supporting them (although with much less enthusiasm than I'd have otherwise) as the lesser of all available evils.
It does seem that quite a few people feel similarly, so I'd hope it'd be possible to create an alternative organisation with a tighter focus and to garner enough support to make it pay, but I'm aware what a huge undertaking a modern browser is, and how difficult it is to stand out in such a mature market.
2. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser testing regularly. Why is it manual?
3. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit this feature creep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole. Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.
OP is not saying he wants decide how Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically. The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity. Shareholders / board…
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same between 2018-2023” would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it will lead to increased revenue.
Rather sad the two proposals here are either "giant browser vendors should pay for it" or "independent web developers should pay for it." It's one thing for developers to pay for things that will develop their independent careers, but MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource; it's something developers constantly use at their jobs. Their employers , big or small, should be the ones paying for it. Of cou…