Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 103 posts

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#71

Post by brimble »

chrisseaton wrote: post #70
montroser wrote: post #11

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me. If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality" But paying for customizations? This seems li…

> If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to funding.

Public Radio wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't also constantly run ads.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#72

Post by notriddle »

chrisseaton wrote: post #70
montroser wrote: post #11

I hope this works for them, but it seems a little bit contrived to me. If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do, I would gladly contribute a few times per year when a big banner shows up asking for donations. That would be a nice direct value proposition -- "please contribute so we can keep this awesome resource free and high quality" But paying for customizations? This seems li…

> If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to funding.

Also, Wikipedia is able to make so much money from just donations because their target audience is "literally everyone."

MDN has a smaller set of users, and the thing with running websites with user-generated content is that it scales up pretty well. MDN probably only costs about a tenth as much as Wikipedia to run, but has much, must less than a tenth as many users.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#73

Post by vbezhenar »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #52
vbezhenar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla management is so expensive to maintain.

Mozilla management is probably around 1% of the budget, more if you count middle management but I doubt you're discussing positions like those.

"Mozilla CEO Increased Her Salary From 2.5 Million Dollars to Over 3 Million"

This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#74

Post by mch82 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #57
mch82 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Browsers are the most important software at those companies because most other software runs on them. The Hacker News community doesn’t seem to appreciate the work Mozilla has done to establish web standards. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be stuck with IE6 and IE11 for a decade, holding back web projects at work. Firefox broke t…

"Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple." Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.

From another point of view, our society has major market inefficiencies around resource allocation that we need to figure out. As a society, we absolutely need a free and open web (modern telecommunications). We also need other things like agriculture, energy, medical tech, sanitation, transportation, and education. Yet we pay people the most to work on ad tech. This is a major, generational problem.

Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out. Google is slowly starting to charge for more services. Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much wealth can be generated by working on major human problems like transport, energy, and space access.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#75

Post by abbe98 »

IshKebab wrote: post #35
_m4ua wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

That's because donations will never even remotely cover Mozilla's costs. They get something like $3m in donations. Wikipedia gets something like $120m. Mozilla's costs and Google income are like $400m.

I wonder how much of Mozilla budget is actually spent on Firefox.

Wikimedia Foundation had a revenue of $157 million in 2021 and >550 staff and contractors.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#76

Post by drdec »

cies wrote: post #2

Death to w3schools! When search engines allowed blacklisting domain, w3schools was my first and only pick. It always seems to show up on top for many web tech questions, but the quality is rubbish. MDN is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I expect it will knock w3schools of it's search result throne in the coming years. The end of a era of low quality, ad sponsored (4 ads, just counted) web technology reference.

I always just add mdn to the search criteria if it's a search related to web technologies.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#77

Post by lucideer »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #60
_m4ua wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a way to donate. All "mozilla" donations go to the foundation and their social justice causes, not useful things like MSN and Firefox.

You can contribute directly to Thunderbird, I often wonder if it's poor performance is one of the reasons similar things aren't tried with Firefox. https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Thunderbird is a separate and entirely voluntary project that Mozilla don't manage.

But even apart from Mozilla's lack of involvement, it's also a wildly different - and so incomparable - product (local email in a webmail dominated world, compared to a browser in a browser dominated world).

Thunderbird would absolutely be worse off if they didn't have that (great, well organised) facility.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#78

Post by boomboomsubban »

vbezhenar wrote: post #73
boomboomsubban wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla management is probably around 1% of the budget, more if you count middle management but I doubt you're discussing positions like those.

"Mozilla CEO Increased Her Salary From 2.5 Million Dollars to Over 3 Million" This person alone receives around 1% of the budget.

When she "increased her salary" she became the CEO seemingly without replacing her old role, becoming the only executive.

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#79

Post by colejohnson66 »

brimble wrote: post #71
chrisseaton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they just took a fundraising approach like how public radio and Wikipedia do People notoriously _hate_ both these group's approach to funding.

Public Radio wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't also constantly run ads.

They have to sometimes because the donations (sadly) aren't always enough

Re: Mozilla and Open Web Docs Working Together on MDN

#80

Post by colejohnson66 »

albedoa wrote: post #55
chrisweekly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's done webdev for a living since 1998, I share the OP's distaste for w3schools -- they truly earned their notoriety as a low-quality, spammy, SEO-hacking parasite. It was so bad it inspired a large group of some of the biggest names in the field to push back with a site called "w3fools" that tried to set the record straight and steer the hapless masses away from w3schools. See eg https://web.archive.or…

> Unfortunately, it seems w3schools has since managed to acquire the w3fools domain "Seems"? Do you know that it is true, or are you guessing?

Probably guessing. The site is still alive, but has been changed to say that W3Schools has cleanup up their act. https://www.w3fools.com/
Post reply on HN