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MDN Plus

developer.mozilla.org

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Re: MDN Plus

#91

Post by VoxPelli »

terminalserver wrote: post #6

With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable. Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing. Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed…

Microsoft and Google are the top financial contributors to MDN: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

Re: MDN Plus

#93

Post by city41 »

chris_engel wrote: post #7

I strongly dislike the idea. It reduces deep knowledge to people who can pay for it. The web should be open for anyone. (yeah, Its already not like this, I know)

On the flip side, corporations that make a ton of money off of this information, rarely, if ever, voluntarily pay for it. It's a hard problem to solve.

Re: MDN Plus

#94

Post by admax88q »

I'm very excited to see all the people who said they would pay for something like MDN find a reason why they won't pay for this.

Re: MDN Plus

#95

Post by [deleted] »

Someone1234 wrote: post #43
worble wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be an A/B test, it's $5/m on my side. Which seems fair to me, although I agree about the product angle; I don't care at all about extra content or features, I'd rather just pay to keep MDN going and have everything available to everyone.

You're right, looks like an A/B test. You can see it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/api/v1/plus/landing-page/varia... If you nuke the sessionid cookie and reload you'll either get "$5 a month or $50 a year" (variant 1) or "$10 a month or $100 a year" (variant 2).

[deleted]

Re: MDN Plus

#96

Post by handrous »

colllectorof wrote: post #50

MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome team.

I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those.

I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think they're long since rotted beyond hope, organizationally. Better they're replaced. I don't think they're an organization capable of replacing themselves with a better upstart of their own making, as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox did to the Mozilla browser, nor of innovating—Pocket and a VPN service are their innovative monetization and self-sufficiency efforts. Not leaping into any number of promising avenues for web services that would benefit from having an open-source-friendly but well-capitalized backer offering a paid version with a built-in audience to push the Web and potentially the Internet forward, but... Pocket and a VPN. How do you miss the boat that badly? How many teams building the sorts of things Firefox should have been (Signal, Matrix, Gemini, IPFS, various open-source social network efforts like Mastodon, et c.) are small enough to comfortably fit within the Firefox org? Several, I imagine.

What a waste of potential.

Re: MDN Plus

#97

Post by ratww »

falcolas wrote: post #82
kojoru wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a concious decision in 2017 to close Google's and Microsoft's web documentation portals so that MDN can be a unified source of truth: https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...

Weird idea - since these big companies all voluntarily stopped documenting in favor of MDN, perhaps they should pay Mozilla for this (it's saving them money, after all).

They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

Re: MDN Plus

#98

Post by pietrovismara »

Zababa wrote: post #89
account42 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a paid option disincentives improvement of the non-paid option.

As long as they're not using the donation money to fund the paid option (which, to be fair, Mozilla has an history of doing), I don't see how.

That's assuming that revenue from MDN plus will go only to fund more premium content.

I don't think that is true (maybe I missed something from their page?), which means they will always have the incentive to make more premium content in order to generate more revenue, especially if they need it to cover the expenses.

Re: MDN Plus

#99

Post by handrous »

have_faith wrote: post #55

I'm a long time MDN and Firefox user but I'm struggling to see the benefit of this beyond one free article a month? all of the other "features" are trivial without the subscription (bookmarks, save as pdf...). Seems like a very weak offering. It feels like this could have landed with a bit more punch and a more compelling sell and it could very well evolve into something very valuable but I can't see the appeal right…

> save as pdf...

Unless they intentionally break it somehow, my print dialog can already do that to any page.

Actually it's even easier: "file -> export to PDF" is an option in Safari. Saves a couple clicks.

I get the idea, but including that on the list of premium features is really weird. Are they just not going to provide a print stylesheet at all, unless you pay? Maybe that's it.

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