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MDN Plus

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Re: MDN Plus

#51

Post by paxys »

nightski wrote: post #43
paxys wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content isn't (and shouldn't be) paywalled. There's no option but to add other paid features around it, which someone users may find useless but others maybe won't. You could also always just treat it as a monthly donation and not use any of it.

That's my point. I'd rather donate and just have the money go towards improving the free content instead of them wasting time on email notifications and useless stuff like that. It feels like my money is being wasted when really I just wanted to support the wiki.

You could always have been donating already then. This is for people who may need these features and so start paying money when they weren't before.

Re: MDN Plus

#52

Post by 2143 »

hbn wrote: post #37

I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.

Probably not very often.

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.

[1] https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

Re: MDN Plus

#53

Post by jasonlotito »

l30n4da5 wrote: post #20

Collections seems completely redundant when we have the ability to use favorites/bookmarks within our browser. Unless i'm missing something that makes collections significantly different/better.

Just to give a point of view of someone who uses features like this on other sites, and genuinely likes this offering:

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.

Re: MDN Plus

#54

Post by flatiron »

nathancahill wrote: post #29
inbx0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real shame that they threw away Firefox Send. It would've been a great addition to that bundle.

The legal liability was too much to stomach. Look at the lawsuits against Mega.

it got flooded with hosted malware as well. i think the free tier had a file size limit which at least clamped down on sharing pirated eldenring and blu-rays. apparently worked perfect for malware though

Re: MDN Plus

#55

Post by geodel »

reitanqild wrote: post #44
jefftk wrote: post #3

Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway. The big question is: Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?

Re: MDN Plus

#56

Post by ibejoeb »

beardedetim wrote: post #25
ibejoeb wrote: post #13

I suppose offline access is nice. I think I'd rather pay for the ability to just download the whole site in some officially supported way. Priming a PWA baked into browser storage is a little roundabout. I want it to be grepable.

There used to be a tool I used that just downloaded all the files of a site locally that the browser requested. Would that be enough here or are you imagining something like it also points all the links to be local and goes and saves future pages as well?

Sure, anyone could just wget mirror the whole thing. My point is more in line with paying Mozilla. I'd be happy to support it, and a simple, precompiled download of MDN would be a good product. It's better for them because it doesn't hammer the infrastructure and better for the end-user because you just `tar xf` it.

Re: MDN Plus

#57

Post by andrew_ »

aldebran wrote: post #39
andrew_ wrote: post #14

Am I an outlier or does their head of product not really appear to have a bead on what developers actually want?

This actually is a very good product. 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.

Unless you have a different experience, Heads of Product tend to be the deciding yes/no vote with regard to product development decisions. It's not a personal thing, it's a role thing.

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.

Re: MDN Plus

#58

Post by KindAndFriendly »

The other day I wanted to learn Svelte. Even though the tutorials on the Svelte homepage are great, I found the MDN Svelte tutorial to be better: it explains the conceptual differences wrt other frontend frameworks well, it explains in detail how to enable Typescript and migrate your projects, and it has a dedicated section that describes different deployment options.

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.

Re: MDN Plus

#59

Post by rzzzt »

geodel wrote: post #55
reitanqild wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway. The big question is: Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?

Maybe somewhere between the two extremes?

Re: MDN Plus

#60

Post by danShumway »

danShumway wrote: post #50
qbasic_forever wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they going to rehire all the dedicated editors and staff they laid off? Or is this really just charging money for all their now open source contributed content...

There's no way to win. 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 d…

I do want to re-state, not as a way of shutting down conversation but as a legitimate idea that might not be a terrible thing for people to pursue if they feel strongly about it:

You could pay people directly to contribute to MDN if you wanted to and if you got enough people together to pay a salary. An org could do that, someone could have a Patreon where a bunch of people drop them a monthly salary to devote X hours a month to editing MDN articles, there are lots of ways of funding that kind of content from professional or at least high-quality writers.

It'll still go through the normal contribution process, but the beauty of this being permissively licensed is that you don't necessarily need Mozilla itself to give people money to contribute content. We're not in the same situation as people donating content to, say, Reddit or Goodreads, where much of that content won't actually be accessible to the community depending on what the company decides to do in the future.

And again, I don't bring that up as a "why are you complaining, just fix it yourself" argument, it's legitimately a thing I would support if there were serious efforts in that direction. If it's something you really care about and feel confident about and you have a drive in that direction, it would probably be helpful to have community-paid editors for MDN.

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