Indeed, without clicking into it, my first thought was "why would anyone pay for free documentation?", but notifications in itself are actually pretty useful for web developers to stay on top of the landscape.
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.
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.
Donations are all fine and dandy, but there are some problems:
- Getting people to donate in a recurring fashion is exceedingly hard. Not impossible (as some patreons prove), but still hard.
- Getting businesses to donate at all, let alone in a recurring fashion, is even harder.
mdn needs money, not just for content, but to keep the lights on. Their content is furthermore aimed largely at "professionals" (and some enthusiasts), meaning convincing businesses to give money is even more important than e.g. is the case with wikipedia or your random youtube content creator.
Businesses are easier to convince to spend money if you offer them something in return. Doesn't really have to be much or something particularly valuable, just something, anything really, that then can be used to justify the expense to management/comptrollers/legal/owners as a "valid" expense.
I personally had people contact me in the past, on more than one occasion, saying they made good use of some code I open sourced in their commercial stuff, and they'd like to gift me something, but they cannot get permission from their employer to transfer any funds unless I formally enter a "consulting" contract (and NDA and yadayada) or officially sell them something. So the best they could do is offer me some company swag and/or a small donation out of their own pocket. So now I own a bunch of T-Shirts and coffee mugs from various companies :P (and I am OK with that, since I never had the intention to profit from that code).
So creating some easy "premium features" may indeed enable mdn to collect more money, especially from businesses, compared to them just asking for donations.
It remains to be seen if that will work for mdn, and if mdn will then use the money "wisely", but I really cannot fault them for their approach so far...
OpenWebDocs is focused on MDN/CanIUse browser compatability data AND MDN content. Many people who used to work for moz on MDN now work with them. OpenWebDocs.org
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.
No the "we'll pay for it!" comments were in the context of the staff being let go and departments spun down. We meant, we'll pay to keep this high quality content going.
No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around for a year, convince people to just give free content for funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec bonuses can keep getting higher.
We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about a high quality web. That Mozilla appears to be long dead.
When people said “we will pay for it” the decision had already been made, it was too late.
Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it’s still available. They are pay-walling features that make it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs offline.
There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal, and Dash, if you want similar features but don’t want to pay Mozilla.
You are not losing anything you already can access to my knowledge.
Neither. As the article specifically mentions, they will not be charging for the existing open content, or any future changes or additions to it. Why you would try to suggest they might do this is beyond me.
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.
> Why you would try to suggest they might do this is beyond me.
Cynical take: because reading is hard so people just don't do it, and see "MDN" in the title so take this as their chance to scream into the void about whatever tangentially related nonsense they care about today.
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 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.
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?
It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes.
The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general.
I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare the take-home-pay of a Google engineer working on Chrome to that of a Mozilla engineer working on Firefox. That’s a good peer comparison to make.
It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.
It's the US median salary. If you're outside of SV and NYC, as a new grad you're looking at $60-70k, with no bonus and no stock (because outside of tech 99% of companies don't give their employees stock until they're at the director/VP level).
> FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).
Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?
OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down.
So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay market rates then you aren't going to get competent leadership to manage organizations at that scale.
Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not guarantee projects' success at all.
I agree with that but I see 90% of the time people just complaining about the high salaries. As much as those salaries may seem ridiculous the Bay Area is a very competitive place and I do not see many competent execs taking a massive downgrade in compensation just because they may believe in Firefox on principal.
That being said poor performance is for sure something to criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about competing with some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth - not an easy job.
People like only certain things about Mozilla, most of which aren't due to execs. Firefox being well engineered (and not having meddling pointless features such as "Colorways") and up on the latest standards, good engineering representation in browser standards from a non-Google, and MDN. That'll do. Oh, and Rust, but the execs already did for that.
Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.
And that's why people are worried about where the money will go.
No idea. But the things I care about are detailed and engineering-related. Execs shouldn't exist by default. Even if I couldn't point to anything bad they've done, that's not enough activation energy to require them.
Generally, yes. That is the allegation. If you don't agree with that fine, but I'd imagine alot of engineers would agree with that in general with their experience in industry. Let alone Mozilla.
But Mozilla's revenue and market share went down since the drastic increase in execs' pay. Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?
The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is that it's Google's fault, because they changed their sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to square 0.
I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give to Mozilla any money since that change happened.
In 2010 it was a tenth of a billion dollars. If any public company went from revenues of $120 million to $560 million executives would unquestionably get a raise.
And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.
Do you apply the same rigorous standards to all your purchases?
Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?
Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of Nestlé, Nike, etc.?
(EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.)
I spend as much of my time, and as many of my resources, as possible away from those horrid greedy bastards.
I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not good. Our system where huge resources go to a self selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it as I can.
I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I do not.
> This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.
I would bet you that most people are in the latter group, not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such services from ordinary companies, as I don't see sufficient value in them.
It isn't just "Mozilla Execs", it's specifically Mitchell Baker[1] because of:
> "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.""
> "By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.[15]"
That is, the people who developed one of the more hyped new programming languages of the last decade were let go, the main MDN team is gone, FireFox OS is gone, long-standing FireFox loyalists were given reduced customisations and a move towards a copy-of-Chrome-but-worse experience, marketshare is down enormously since the peak, there's been a churn of janky also-rans like promoting Goya beans or something, who even knows.
What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries? Microsoft's share price is 7x higher since Satya Nadella took over. Tesla's share price is 15x higher since 2018. Amazon's share price has almost tripled since 2018. Apple's share price has more than tripled since 2018. Facebook almost doubled since 2018 (but has fallen some). CEO thinks it's unfair that other CEOs get paid more??
It's not even uniquely greedy, if the service is going well. I am annoyed at travel tickets for trains in the UK which are more expensive than flying, often late, all too often don't turn up at all, often crowded to the point of cramped standing room with the argument that "our contracts prevent us buying more carriages". If then the CEOs were saying "it's unfair that well run travel company CEOs earn more, so we're going to raise our salaries" that would be annoying. (They probably even do say that, but they have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, or to make up something about doing a good job).
>What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries?
Using the same timescale as the Wikipedia article, 2008 to 2018, Mozilla's revenue had risen from $78.6 million to $436 million. A more than 400% increase. Does that justify her salary?
Using the same timescale, Wikipedia itself (the Wikimedia Foundation) went from $5M revenue to $120M, 24x. [1],[2]. During that time the Executive Director's salary went from $168k to $387k[3]. At the end of Sue Gardner's leadership in 2014 there was a question about her $300k salary[4] which included the response:
"(2) Retention bonus to compensate Sue for lost opportunities during the
transition period: $165,000."
This seems to undermine Mitchell Baker's reasons for her salary increase, doesn't it?
The Wikimedia Foundation is solely a charity and makes it's money from donations. The Mozilla Corporation makes it's money from the contracts the executives negotiate. None of the board members of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the corporation, receive any salary from the Foundation.
They're not really comparable organizations. The corporate comparisons you started with were closer comparison, though Mozilla has some unique circumstances.
Paying Mozilla is mostly a donation, not a purchase.
It is reasonable to scrutinize on the accountability when it comes to donations, even for normal donors.
I do have a regular donation to the Mozilla Foundation but I too wish I could chip in specifically to Firefox proper.
Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?
No, I'm normally not that picky (or actually not that well informed, which would be a prerequisite), I just avoid anything from Nestlé, I'm subscribed to /r/FuckNestle/ on Reddit to spot their many subsidiary brands I would not be aware of.
I indeed don't care at all about the MDN Plus perks, it would just be a donation to keep a browser alive. I would hate it if the money did NOT go into keeping the browser alive. Current execs are killing the company while pocketing insane (market competitive, sure, but incommensurate with the absolute lack of success in their leadership) salaries, while devs are being let go. I can't support this status quo with my money.
Are you serious? What company or organization works like this? With goal posts like this, you've got the perfect excuse to never donate any money to them.
How do you give an organization money, and ensure that that specific dollar doesn't go to the execs? Any money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to pretend they don't exist.
Mozilla laid off most of the MDN team in 2020 [1], then shifted the responsibility of updating MDN from Mozilla to the community [2], then created the Open Web Docs organization to take over the job of funding MDN [3].
And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this.
I already replied to this kind of logic elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257), but I don't see the logic of looking at Mozilla cutting support for a program then introducing a way to fund that program, and responding to that by saying, "why should I fund something that's seeing cuts?"
Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.
> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
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?
If they were nonprofits working for the good of humanity, and yet had exponentially increased their executive salaries over the last five years while market share went down, then yes.
> 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?
It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.
While what you’re saying is factually correct, my biggest pet peeve is that Firefox is entirely owned and developed by the corporation. If I donate money to Mozilla, it ends up with the silly projects instead of the browser.
To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading.
As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.
When you say "Mitchell Baker owns it all", you aren't claiming that Mitchell owns Mozilla Corp, are you? Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation, as described in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Most Mozilla employees draw their salary from Mozilla Corp.
And that question being common is exactly why many non-profits have focused on reducing "overhead", actually making the organisation less efficient, because having e.g. medical workers do their own administration doesn't get listed as overhead, whereas hiring a secretary does.
With charities in general, it'd be better if people focused on results more, rather than on how resources are being allocated. Luckily, that idea has been gaining more and more traction, e.g. GiveWell.
>> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
> 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?
Mozilla is a lot more like a charity than an actual business, and people do ask questions like that about charities (e.g. how much of a donation will go to admin overhead vs program work is often reported for them).
It seemed like the person you're responding to was asking a rhetorical question that responded to the original statement ("here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is"), not directing a question at Mozilla itself.
As a response to that prompt, it's a completely legitimate question to ask: would my money actually be going where I want it to go?
Anyway, I think people do ask themselves where the money they spend goes. They do that all the time. It's the basis boycotting different businesses. They don't ask it in every case, such as when the question has been answered already, or where there isn't ongoing controversy about how money is being spent.
I always wonder at the thought process behind these questions.
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?
It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.
But we have a lot of control over the software we use on a daily basis, and there are several capable browsers. I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy, is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for many. If it doesn't, they want to know so they can change it. Food is a little more complicated in that regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.
Like I anwered to a sibling comment of yours, I'm not making a point about whether Firefox fits the bill; I'm trying to say that focusing on exec pay, rather than on whether it does fit the bill, is probably focusing on the wrong things.
For this to be an accurate comparison, there should be two free sources of peanut butter, one that I want to donate to because it helps keep the peanut butter playing field level, while the other has a massive majority of the peanut butter market and uses that to do various anticompetitive things. But the one I want to support doesn't accept donations, only the parent conglomerate does.
I feel like you might be missing the point I'm (and GGP's) trying to make. If you're considering whether to give your money, why would you focus on exec salaries rather than results? So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?
(And to pre-empt that: I'm not saying you can't criticise results. I'm saying that focusing on exec pay rather than on results feels misdirected.)
> So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?
I think we both agree on this. What they pay their execs is irrelevant. What I'm saying is, I'm not buying peanut butter, it's available for free. I am considering donating money for the peanut butter I already get for free, but the grocery conglomerate that accepts donations on behalf has already fired half the peanut farmers, and discontinued the Crunchy variety that I really liked.
I usually bring this point up when discussing donating to charities, so I'd say: you're not buying access to MDN for yourself, you're buying it being available for free to the world.
If they said you could donate on top of the jar price to help the poor third world peanut farmers, and you did so, and then found that money went to the CEO's salary and a rebranded PeanutVPN product, and then the Peanut Butter CEO justified it by saing that Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella get paid a lot so it's not fair if they don't, would none of that that annoy you?
I'm really unhappy with how much money Spotify is pumping into podcasts because I really want them to give that money to musicians instead (I don't listen to podcasts)
They’re not podcasts if they’re behind a paywall. They’re commercial shows that happen to benefit from the conflation. They are broadcasts and you are right to be concerned when a company supposedly selling commercial-free access to music starts providing anything beyond music.
> Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?
Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this case with Mozilla.
The difference with other services is that what people want when they subscribe to Spotify is access to music. What (at least some) people want when they subscribe to MDN Plus is ensure that Firefox and other open Web projects stay relevant. If people paid for Spotify merely so that Spotify stayed relevant, they would probably care in similar measure how Spotify spends its money.
Criticism is not always respectful and it stings more often than not but it’s important to long-term success. What would help the open web even more would be to address issues instead of asking that no one brings up. (You’re also very much allowed to be tired of reading it over and over without it being invalid.)
It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.
I think these questions come from the idea baked into charitable giving. When you purchase a good, the thing you're getting is obvious, it is what you're purchasing.
However, when you're giving to charity, what are you getting? You probably want to know.
If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of this by creating classic ladders which encourage more contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of their donation" goes.
>Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?
If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing the events and paying for staff than doing anything else. Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.
> 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.
The money goes to wherever the foundation think it's going to be more valuable. It may be engineer salaries, C-Level compensation or just sit at a bank as a reserve.
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.
The only 3rd party requests I see on their pages are Google analytics and a CDN'd js lib. Hell yes I'll throw them some cash if they'll keep their core product free for folks who don't use it often/can't afford it. I'd love to see them get rid of google analytics even, but compared to most it's pretty clean.
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.
Agreed. Considering how much they put into usability, they should be able to get enough data without third party tracking involved at all. That said, perfect is the enemy of good and I'll give them credit for being good— especially considering the norm.
Subscribing to MDN Plus does not support Open Web Docs, which is the organization that does the funding for creating/managing the content for the free product.
Sad truth is nobody wants to pay for anything and when they can they'll just complain.
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.
I was a loud proponent of this and just signed up at the $10 tier. I'm thrilled to see they put this together but still dismayed at the re-org that resulted in firing (some?) of the staff that maintained MDN.
I will. As soon as they allow me to pay, because I do not plan to move to US or Canada.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Agreed. I rarely use bookmarks, and when I do the only reason is to make the URL show up in omnibar suggestions faster. If I find content I really care about, I put it in my notes. Otherwise, if the content is interesting but not crucial, I use the site’s favoriting mechanism if available (GitHub stars mostly).
Honestly, this is the kind of thing I like to see from Mozilla. Very straightforward, plus a way to support this valuable learning resource. I hope it generates some meaningful revenue!
It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers.
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.
This is a fair point. I am a supporter of OGS (online-go.com) and I get the same sense of convenience benefits as perks which I could get anyway with only some minimum effort. However I do like this go server and I use it a lot, they deserve my money, and getting some perks back for my donations just feels nice. It is a way for them to say: “Hey, we appreciate your donations, have some perks”.
The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.
Ring fencing funds could be a real issue for Mozilla. They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser) since it's non- revenue earning. I wouldn't mind these funds going towards Firefox, or even other products woth a little reluctance, but agree they shouldn't go towards other costs like bonuses or "operation costs".
> They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser)
No, they don't. The Corporation receives almost half a billion USD annually—over 2.5x what they were bringing in 10 years ago (when they were supporting 20+% of the world's Web browsing; for comparison, they're now at <5%). And whatever they make from MDN Plus, it likely won't even be half of what they flush down the toilet on the marketing department every year.
> since it's non- revenue earning
What? There's a reason why Firefox is Mozilla Corp's primary focus, you know—because it's one of the few things that does pay for itself (and then some—most of Mozilla's adventures are funded by revenue tied to Firefox).
> I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team. E.g. [...] Personal A offers their response [to someone else, person B1]. Person B2 offers a second rebuttal that abandons the premise behind B1's rebuttal, and may actually be at odds with it.[...] It's like the cross product of a Gish gallop and a DDoS.
The comment I wrote was a response to someone who staked their claim on the controvertible assertion that Mozilla "desperately" needs money as a result of Firefox being "non- revenue earning". (Not just being unable to cover the costs for their own existence, but straight up bringing no revenue whatsoever.) That's completely at odds with reality.
You can try to avoid the extant thread of discussion by mentioning something else that's true but irrelevant. At that point, however, it's a completely different conversation. Please don't do this.
"They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser) since it's non- revenue earning."
Isn't Firefox by far the largest revenue earning product they have? It currently generates revenue of $400-450 million a year through the sale of the default search engine within the browser.
It's a wiki (at least it used to be). A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort building up the content on the site. Not for nothing—I got an intercontinental flight, a stay in a nice hotel, and a conference ticket in a new city—but many of the people who made the developer.mozilla.org content what it is are never going to see any of that money. The MDN staff, though, some of whom are almost certainly overcompensated despite project mismanagement and dubious choices on par with the judgment of Mozilla leadership itself, definitely will see some non-zero amount appear in their bank account every pay period.
For outsiders to show up with such strong opinions like yours, it feels... weird, at the very least.
Mozilla's not a cult. The users of their products are not outsiders. Having someone who worked their frame it like that really illuminates the current vibe I get from Mozilla.
I contributed without being MDN staff (which pretty much didn't even exist at the time)—that's sort of the whole point of my comment:
1. Mozilla sets up a wiki.
2. Contributors from the community work the content.
3. Paid Mozilla staff handle the infrastructure and, for better or worse, issue fatwas about high-level project direction—and, to be fair, write and edit some content, too (also for better or worse).
4. Years later, Mozilla starts a subscription service.
5. People not otherwise in-the-know show up and make weird proclamations about promises they want to be made about how/where money gets spent—with nary an indication that they understand how the content that they value actually came to exist.**
If you think my characterization of people from #5 as "outsiders" is off—(to the point of making low-effort, sanctimonious quips in defense of the fanclub's honor*)—then I don't know what to tell you except that we clearly have a different set of ideals. Whatever the case, addressing me as "someone who worked their" indicates not just that you missed the point entirely, but that you're very confused about the basic facts that form the premise of the discussion.
* this is in the middle of a discussion about a failure to acknowledge the existence of people who are actually responsible for the thing that they're fans of, no less
If you're interested in solely contributing to the documentation rather than Mozilla, perhaps consider a donation to Open Web Docs?
"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."
Right, but I think those situations are far and few between. If you're a person who is regularly without internet access, there's probably better areas to work in than the web where you may need to deploy emergency fixes on short notice.
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.
I use Zeal. You can have super fast internet, but having instant "pop up the python docs for this thing" along with searching while typing is a joy.
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.
Since top sites on Google results (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools etc..) are generally considered suboptimal, what are some good sites for 'how do I do X?' style articles?
I use documentation sources like MDN (via Zeal) or Rust docs (via local files loaded in the browser) while offline not uncommonly—I might go for a few months without doing so, but then I might go for a week of accessing them offline daily. Knowing that I don’t depend on an internet connection for it is very desirable.
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.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed to personally organize parts of MDN but I might just subscribe to support the place. Who knows, maybe I’ll love the new features. Notifications could be helpful, though I’m more the “check in when I’m about to use some method to see if it’s changed” kind of engineer and less the “stay as up to date as possible” kind of engineer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
Notifications could be hugely valuable for developers who are looking to build feature-rich apps that rely on lots of new web platform features that are not yet supported on all browsers.
Why? You'll know them anyway from caniuse, given if you want to support a broad range of users you won't want to just support the latest version of browsers anyway.
Depreciation alerts might help too. I wonder if MDN could build a tool to go through your HTML and JS/TS and notify you of upcoming changes that might impact you.
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.
Same with Django. It feels like the MDN tutorials come from someone that knows more of what you’ll run into when learning it. The Django docs while great have a bit of that “I built this so let me give you ALL the details or a very basic thing”. MSN is right in the middle.
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 :)
> Any highlight(s) regarding positive/negative experiences that you had with Svelte so far?
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.
Just fyi, there is no need to use Redux just because you're using React.
If it's a pretty simple case, you can use the built in `useReducer`[0].
Or if you want something that'll scale but that's much more lightweight than Redux, I'd recommend Zustand[1].
Zustand looks so nice. I wanted to create my own state management library just for fun and spent a while brainstorming it and then ran into Zustand which basically does exactly what I wanted (but has presumably been developed by people who know what they're doing_
Pros:
- Very easy to learn. If you know TS/JS+HTML, there are ~ a handful new syntax expressions to learn, but otherwise you're good to go.
- Easy to integrate an external CSS framework such as bootstrap
- Built-int TS support. Being able to use types in your frontend code is delightful.
Cons:
- The generated output puts the vast majority of the content in the JS files (vs having a least some skeleton or so in HTML).
I'm not the OP, but I find working with SvelteKit to be an extremely positive experience. It has completely re-sparked my love of programming.
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.
I only realized this a bit ago, but the docs of every product are essentially press pieces. They can't really call out "we suck at this", or "product X is way better, use it instead". Only third parties ever do this, so that's what this is so often the case.
This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided.
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.
Re: notifications I think it's a smart move. Back when I was content lead for https://web.dev I was floating around ideas along the same lines. Web developers learn of great new feature X and are disappointed to learn that it's only supported on a single browser. They then forget about the feature for years even though in the meantime it has been implemented on all their target browsers. Notifications of some sort solves this problem. I agree however that whether people will pay for this feature is debatable. Browser vendors should be incentivized to provide this feature for free somehow because it's in their own best interest to increase adoption of new web platform features.
Also, things like collections have been on sites like docs.microsoft.com[0] for some time. I find it somewhat odd personally to gate documentation-related features behind a membership fee, but I do not have full context on MDN product decisions or roadmap.
Or, better, for your employer to do so. It’s really hard to get permission to donate money at many large organizations but if the CIO kicks in $20k/year for support, training, etc. the accounting department won’t even blink.
This way seems pretty easy: https://donate.mozilla.org/ I just set up a recurring monthly donation there specifically because I'm repulsed by the idea of anything that even approaches "pay-for-play" within the sphere of technical documentation.
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..
Notifications for new web standards/implementations is actually something I wanted this morning, but I just went to https://caniuse.com and added its news page to my RSS reader.
The value is that they've documented every front-end DOM api for you and done a lot of leg work for free for years. This will fund their efforts and they do more than just web, they've also been adding documentation on doing back-end web development as well. I'm sure the more subscribers they get, the more they can add. I sincerely hope MDN keeps the majority of the income from these efforts. For front-end work I skip Google or Stack Overflow and look through MDN.
I like the idea! While I do not need these premium features I wanted to hit the "sign me up" button instantly just to support them. But then I found out that there's no such button and my country is not on going to be supported anytime soon.
And if MDN people are reading this: consider adding an "enterprise" option with centralized account management.
Mozilla is always bad at supporting international customers on their commercial products. Surely their payment processor is capable of accepting cards from all countries where visa and mastercard operate, right? So what's stopping them from selling their products in all countries? Tax?
It's especially hilarious when their vpn products only available for select countries, but their vendor (Mullvad) accept purchases from all countries.
There's something in the water at Mozilla that negatively effects all product decisions.
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.
A paid tier would be a product if it granted you access to content that solves problems you can't get for free.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 413 ms ] threadToo 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.
- Getting people to donate in a recurring fashion is exceedingly hard. Not impossible (as some patreons prove), but still hard.
- Getting businesses to donate at all, let alone in a recurring fashion, is even harder.
mdn needs money, not just for content, but to keep the lights on. Their content is furthermore aimed largely at "professionals" (and some enthusiasts), meaning convincing businesses to give money is even more important than e.g. is the case with wikipedia or your random youtube content creator.
Businesses are easier to convince to spend money if you offer them something in return. Doesn't really have to be much or something particularly valuable, just something, anything really, that then can be used to justify the expense to management/comptrollers/legal/owners as a "valid" expense.
I personally had people contact me in the past, on more than one occasion, saying they made good use of some code I open sourced in their commercial stuff, and they'd like to gift me something, but they cannot get permission from their employer to transfer any funds unless I formally enter a "consulting" contract (and NDA and yadayada) or officially sell them something. So the best they could do is offer me some company swag and/or a small donation out of their own pocket. So now I own a bunch of T-Shirts and coffee mugs from various companies :P (and I am OK with that, since I never had the intention to profit from that code).
So creating some easy "premium features" may indeed enable mdn to collect more money, especially from businesses, compared to them just asking for donations.
It remains to be seen if that will work for mdn, and if mdn will then use the money "wisely", but I really cannot fault them for their approach so far...
Or is this really just charging money for all their now open source contributed content...
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.
No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around for a year, convince people to just give free content for funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec bonuses can keep getting higher.
We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about a high quality web. That Mozilla appears to be long dead.
Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it’s still available. They are pay-walling features that make it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs offline.
There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal, and Dash, if you want similar features but don’t want to pay Mozilla.
You are not losing anything you already can access to my knowledge.
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.
Cynical take: because reading is hard so people just don't do it, and see "MDN" in the title so take this as their chance to scream into the void about whatever tangentially related nonsense they care about today.
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.
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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.
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.
The big question is:
Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general.
I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.
Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome. Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.
I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's much too low.
The figures at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla.
You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.
FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).
So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
If they want to get better market share they should start paying more!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol...
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Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?
That being said poor performance is for sure something to criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about competing with some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth - not an easy job.
Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.
And that's why people are worried about where the money will go.
Bad engineering things are all because of execs?
The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is that it's Google's fault, because they changed their sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to square 0.
I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give to Mozilla any money since that change happened.
If their revenue went way up, absolutely. Which is what happened when the executives got more money.
And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.
Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?
Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of Nestlé, Nike, etc.?
(EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.)
I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not good. Our system where huge resources go to a self selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it as I can.
I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I do not.
I would bet you that most people are in the latter group, not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such services from ordinary companies, as I don't see sufficient value in them.
> "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.""
> "By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.[15]"
That is, the people who developed one of the more hyped new programming languages of the last decade were let go, the main MDN team is gone, FireFox OS is gone, long-standing FireFox loyalists were given reduced customisations and a move towards a copy-of-Chrome-but-worse experience, marketshare is down enormously since the peak, there's been a churn of janky also-rans like promoting Goya beans or something, who even knows.
What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries? Microsoft's share price is 7x higher since Satya Nadella took over. Tesla's share price is 15x higher since 2018. Amazon's share price has almost tripled since 2018. Apple's share price has more than tripled since 2018. Facebook almost doubled since 2018 (but has fallen some). CEO thinks it's unfair that other CEOs get paid more??
It's not even uniquely greedy, if the service is going well. I am annoyed at travel tickets for trains in the UK which are more expensive than flying, often late, all too often don't turn up at all, often crowded to the point of cramped standing room with the argument that "our contracts prevent us buying more carriages". If then the CEOs were saying "it's unfair that well run travel company CEOs earn more, so we're going to raise our salaries" that would be annoying. (They probably even do say that, but they have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, or to make up something about doing a good job).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
Using the same timescale as the Wikipedia article, 2008 to 2018, Mozilla's revenue had risen from $78.6 million to $436 million. A more than 400% increase. Does that justify her salary?
"(2) Retention bonus to compensate Sue for lost opportunities during the transition period: $165,000."
This seems to undermine Mitchell Baker's reasons for her salary increase, doesn't it?
Wikipedia also gets a slightly higher score from CharityNavigator than Mozilla, edging them out on more efficient earnings, lower admin overhead, but far ahead on "growth of expenses": https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 vs https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200097189
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#sec...
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
They're not really comparable organizations. The corporate comparisons you started with were closer comparison, though Mozilla has some unique circumstances.
I do have a regular donation to the Mozilla Foundation but I too wish I could chip in specifically to Firefox proper.
No, I'm normally not that picky (or actually not that well informed, which would be a prerequisite), I just avoid anything from Nestlé, I'm subscribed to /r/FuckNestle/ on Reddit to spot their many subsidiary brands I would not be aware of.
I indeed don't care at all about the MDN Plus perks, it would just be a donation to keep a browser alive. I would hate it if the money did NOT go into keeping the browser alive. Current execs are killing the company while pocketing insane (market competitive, sure, but incommensurate with the absolute lack of success in their leadership) salaries, while devs are being let go. I can't support this status quo with my money.
How do you give an organization money, and ensure that that specific dollar doesn't go to the execs? Any money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to pretend they don't exist.
And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...
Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.
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?
It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.
Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the corporation according to public records.
Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp leases it, funneling money around.
Statements are public.
To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading.
As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.
Most Mozilla employees draw their salary from Mozilla Corp.
She controls everything. Including her own comp.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/
If the board were to decide that Mitchell's time as leader was done, they could do so.
With charities in general, it'd be better if people focused on results more, rather than on how resources are being allocated. Luckily, that idea has been gaining more and more traction, e.g. GiveWell.
> 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?
Mozilla is a lot more like a charity than an actual business, and people do ask questions like that about charities (e.g. how much of a donation will go to admin overhead vs program work is often reported for them).
I don’t know how many appeals I have seen asking me to use Firefox to help preserve the open web.
When they are asking you to behave altruistically, it is your right to ask about their behavior as well.
As a response to that prompt, it's a completely legitimate question to ask: would my money actually be going where I want it to go?
Anyway, I think people do ask themselves where the money they spend goes. They do that all the time. It's the basis boycotting different businesses. They don't ask it in every case, such as when the question has been answered already, or where there isn't ongoing controversy about how money is being spent.
But this is a special case IMO -- Firefox is something people care very deeply as they view it as a crucial bastion of the free and open internet.
Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.
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?
We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.
(And to pre-empt that: I'm not saying you can't criticise results. I'm saying that focusing on exec pay rather than on results feels misdirected.)
I think we both agree on this. What they pay their execs is irrelevant. What I'm saying is, I'm not buying peanut butter, it's available for free. I am considering donating money for the peanut butter I already get for free, but the grocery conglomerate that accepts donations on behalf has already fired half the peanut farmers, and discontinued the Crunchy variety that I really liked.
If you are giving charitable donation to the Mozilla Foundation, it is entirely reasonable to ask what they use that money for.
Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this case with Mozilla.
I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason by propaganda.
If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the open web with these comments then that makes both my brain and heart hurt.
It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.
However, when you're giving to charity, what are you getting? You probably want to know.
If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of this by creating classic ladders which encourage more contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of their donation" goes.
If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing the events and paying for staff than doing anything else. Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.
> 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.
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
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.
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
Treat this as an annual donation and don’t use the features. Seems like an easy solution.
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.
- Devdocs
- Zeal on Linux and Windows
- Dash on mac
It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> They desperately need new revenue streams to support their primary product (the Firefox browser)
No, they don't. The Corporation receives almost half a billion USD annually—over 2.5x what they were bringing in 10 years ago (when they were supporting 20+% of the world's Web browsing; for comparison, they're now at <5%). And whatever they make from MDN Plus, it likely won't even be half of what they flush down the toilet on the marketing department every year.
> since it's non- revenue earning
What? There's a reason why Firefox is Mozilla Corp's primary focus, you know—because it's one of the few things that does pay for itself (and then some—most of Mozilla's adventures are funded by revenue tied to Firefox).
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117242>
The comment I wrote was a response to someone who staked their claim on the controvertible assertion that Mozilla "desperately" needs money as a result of Firefox being "non- revenue earning". (Not just being unable to cover the costs for their own existence, but straight up bringing no revenue whatsoever.) That's completely at odds with reality.
You can try to avoid the extant thread of discussion by mentioning something else that's true but irrelevant. At that point, however, it's a completely different conversation. Please don't do this.
Isn't Firefox by far the largest revenue earning product they have? It currently generates revenue of $400-450 million a year through the sale of the default search engine within the browser.
For outsiders to show up with such strong opinions like yours, it feels... weird, at the very least.
1. Mozilla sets up a wiki.
2. Contributors from the community work the content.
3. Paid Mozilla staff handle the infrastructure and, for better or worse, issue fatwas about high-level project direction—and, to be fair, write and edit some content, too (also for better or worse).
4. Years later, Mozilla starts a subscription service.
5. People not otherwise in-the-know show up and make weird proclamations about promises they want to be made about how/where money gets spent—with nary an indication that they understand how the content that they value actually came to exist.**
If you think my characterization of people from #5 as "outsiders" is off—(to the point of making low-effort, sanctimonious quips in defense of the fanclub's honor*)—then I don't know what to tell you except that we clearly have a different set of ideals. Whatever the case, addressing me as "someone who worked their" indicates not just that you missed the point entirely, but that you're very confused about the basic facts that form the premise of the discussion.
* this is in the middle of a discussion about a failure to acknowledge the existence of people who are actually responsible for the thing that they're fans of, no less
** see also "Who Writes Wikipedia?" (2006) <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia>
You can get into MDN team and get "overcompensated" too. There must be plenty of budget after recent layoffs, right?
"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-...
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
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.
Stingy me would just wget download the entire documentation if I anticipate that I might go offline.
Can't say I'll ever be okay with paying for documentation; I don't want that to catch on.
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.
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.
But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
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.
If it's a pretty simple case, you can use the built in `useReducer`[0]. Or if you want something that'll scale but that's much more lightweight than Redux, I'd recommend Zustand[1].
[0] https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-reference.html#usereducer [1] https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand
Got it - thank you :)
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 :)
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.
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.
[0]: https://zealdocs.org/
[1]: https://devdocs.io/
[0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/app-service/quickstart-node...
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..
If that's the value, why don't they lead with that and leave the rest out?
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.
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.