The entire Mozilla MDN team is laid off | Hacker News Reader

The entire Mozilla MDN team is laid off

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86 pointsausjke20 comments

"entire MDN writers team" is a really important distinction, given the misunderstandings in comments here and elsewhere.

It's tragic, but it doesn't mean MDN is going away.

What’s the difference? Who is going to continue writing?

Google, Microsoft and Samsung earlier committed to collaborate on MDN, so Google, Microsoft, Samsung and anyone else as MDN is publically editable.

Are you sure this will be standard documentation? Or Google Chrome Spyware documentation? Become MS and Google both are using same thing with different names

It's a big difference! People on HN have really come out of the woodwork in a panic with plans to rehost them under the assumption it's getting shut down.

Paying for good dedicated writers is unfortunately expensive, but merely hosting MDN isn't, and it isn't going anywhere.

Wikipedia still gets updated without core writers, but Mozilla's unrepaid charity of producing quality webdev documents for Chrome users is at an end.

Mozilla unrepaid charity does a large number of projects many times less useful than MDN. At the same time, MDN is perfectly aligned with Mozilla declared mission of making a better internet.

> hosting MDN

Outdated snapshot of MDN would become useless in several months.

It means MDN as we know it will slowly be going away. One of the important things MDN and Mozilla's maintaining of it was the promoting of standards and Firefox's implemdntation of them. With Mozilla ceasing to maintain this it means that Firefox will be seen less as a leader in developing and defining standards.

I see this as either a temporary tighening of the belt for efficiency during tough times or a change in direction of focus.

This is disappointing. I have tried to keep using Firefox and Mozilla products. I had recently helped friends and family members switch from Chrome. The recent layoffs and the awful rollout of the new Firefox on Android is making me rethink this. MDN is an important resource, the content needs to be maintained.

You’re overthinking it. Mozilla and Firefox are not going anywhere, they’re just doing some pruning - like they’ve done in the past and will likely do again in the future, it’s just a business cycle.

It really seems to be withering and the latest announcement is not encouraging for the future of Firefox.

W/o over thinking it, Mozilla is in a death spiral, from which it can't escape. It's just a matter of time.

With overthinking though, there is some hope left but you really need to stretch your beliefs.

In the worst scenario, if there is enough public interest to keep an industrial-grade kernel afloat, there is enough interest to keep an industrial-grade browser afloat. Firefox will survive Mozilla Corp like the original Mozilla suite survived Netscape.

TBH I don't think we'll ever get there. Mozilla just need to refocus a bit.

Possibly. The leading open source browser is currently Chromium though and its components are already extremely popular in the developer world. Node.js uses the V8 component. Electron, CEF, NWJS, and others use almost the whole thing for embeddable applications. Firefox even uses a lot of the open source components from Google like Skia. Many different companies and independent teams maintain customized versions of Chromium that are anything from settings customizations to large modifications.

So the question is not "is there going to be public interest to keep an industrial grade browser afloat" it's "is there enough developer interest to keep Firefox afloat when the thing that ate its lunch is open source".

And of course there are various levels of "afloat". Some forks of XUL Firefox are kept "afloat" as in they still compile but have no modern security model or major feature development.

The big thing though is open source developers never lost the opportunity to help FF achieve webrender or e10s or Quantum or add HDR support. Mozilla doesn't have to die before people can decide there is interest in keeping the browser afloat but it has slowly been dying for years. The only major feature I can think of that landed via community contribution was accelerated video decoding on Linux. Maybe that will change if Mozilla does go away but it's not a good sign it will lead to a truly "afloat" version.

Thunderbird would have likely not survived latest layoffs have it not been in separate subsidiary company https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

edit: could we expect Firefox to go same fate?

Back to w3schools then I guess :/

Oh hell nah

In a way I prefer to read source code of Chrome and Firefox than using W3 "documentation". Only if day had 72 hours and I didn't have a child I honestly would consider it seriously

And to MSIE6 in that case.

That sucks. Any idea what will happen to MDN? (Maybe they can open source it?)

Stupid question probably: how is the MDN team paying the bills?

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