MDN Plus
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
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.
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-...
I have no need for any of the stuff in the supporter plan but even at $100 a year this is a total bargain. I know I don’t have to pay for it, but with the amount of value I’ve gotten out of MDN over the years it’s a steAl. I’ll buy this as soon as am back at my laptop. I have no analytics to support it, but I swear !mdn is my most used DuckDuckGo shortcut. I’m signing up as soon as I’m back at my laptop.
Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on MDN or contributed at any capacity.
But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
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.
[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?
But... no sign up button.
Two of the internal links point to more info on features, which have a different menu at the top with a 'get mdn plus' button. I guess that's how you're supposed to get it?
Just surprised they felt the need to avoid putting a sign up link on the blog post. Yes, that's a bit rude, I know.
In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.
Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement power.
I would personally never advocate for that, but it’s a potential solution.
The long version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200222053906/http://slatestarc...
This. Look at the real NATO, when they band together and tell an adversary (Russia) not to break standards (declare war), they listen. A web NATO would be just as effective. You are right.
If the (admittedly biased) reports I've heard are any indication, Putin has surrounded himself with yes-men, causing him to overestimate his chances of winning. In economic terms, this makes the war "stupid," because it lowers the utility for both sides of the conflict. Economic solutions, which work by trying to align the interests of the many with the interests of the individual, don't work on stupid people, who cannot be relied upon to act in their own self-interest.
Expecting the government to succeed in literally everything they try, even in the presence of unpredictable stupid people, is pretty unrealistic. I just want to know if they'll do better than private industry.
[0] Of course, my other bugbear here is that this constant churn adds non-trivial quantities of non-value-adding effort to my roadmap and backlogs. Again, individuals and smaller companies pay the price for big tech's high-handedness. Not cool.
Last I looked most of the browsers were open source and being funded in the 100s of millions of dollars.
Browser APIs change far less than the impression that most people have. (That impression is mostly the result of churn in what's fashionable on GitHub/Twitter this month, i.e. non-standards-based code from arbitrary projects that don't have anything to do with the browser except that they themselves are built to run in the browser.) Browser APIs are mostly cumulative.
The places where that isn't true are almost all experimental APIs. Arguably, these shouldn't be "advertised" within the reference to begin with—even before we ever consider the cost of keeping those pages up-to-date.
"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-...
MDN is a wiki and maintained by innumerable contributors
For example, the webRTC docs are great and explain a lot about how it works... however, there is very little information about good patterns for including it in your application. I bet people would be happy to pay for guides like that, I would.
in 2022, i really hate this "users told us" phrasing, because it's always misleading, and even normative at the margin. users didn't tell you anything, you inferred that from, here, a single survey (and that's more pretext than most provide). left to our own devices, users express feelings first and foremost, even if formulated reasonably. it's almost always ad hoc rationalization, because most users don't care enough to think deeply enough about your product in that moment of inquiry. you have to elicit and infer what they value, and there are plenty of quantitative (marketing) techniques these days to do so, but that takes real work and forethought.
this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over, and it's naive at the very least. it's also how you get a product feature list that most people here (potential customers and customer advocates) seem to feel is lackluster and are even mocking.
with all that said, i find this offering at least closer to something i'd pay for than something like pocket or vpn. there are tons of value-added features that mozilla can offer on top of a browser and web dev that no one else would really want to tackle. they just need to do some real market research, rather than larp'ing it.
(i really should start a product blog just to catalog all these silly things.)
Except that's a made up quote. That phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the part you lifted from the blog post (the thing that's an _actual_ quote) or any other part of it.
sometimes we characterize a phenomenon with a succinct phrase that's meant to represent more than the literal quote.
Don't make up quotes. It's against the rules.
Shockingly, this isn't even listed as a featured bullet on the plan list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe The only bulleted advantages of paying $10/month are, "Early access to new features" and "Pride and joy."
As others have noted here, none of the "Plus" features are very useful: Collections, Notifications, and Offline support. Collections are just bookmarks, which all browsers do for free. Notifications are pointless, because all of the pages are on Github; you can subscribe to notifications there (but why would you even want to??). And I approximately never need to use MDN when I'm offline.
We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that.
This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result.
EDIT: Buyer beware, I just signed up for the plan, and all it does is add a "Feedback" menu item that links to https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback … but that's a public repo. Anyone can file an issue there. I certainly did, and I'm not happy about it. https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43
There's no Discord, no forum, no mailing list, no scheduled upcoming fireside chat… just a public Github repo where you can file an issue and hope for a response.
Or put another way, why wouldn't you just pay money directly to the content creators who are putting stuff on MDN? These are likely the folks making patreons, paid courses, etc. and are the subject matter experts you'd want to engage.
I have personally derived massive value (time, money, effort) from MDN and will do anything I can to help ensure it outlives me and my petty interests.
Congratulations on the launch. I hope that your best days are ahead.
Thanks, from the bottom of my cynical heart, for the thousands of times you've told me exactly what I needed to know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I have the repo locally, so Plus isn't tempting. But if it adds something that is of value to you, giving money to mozilla isn't a waste I don't think. That said, Open Web Docs is a good investment. I think it's even tax deductible, but either way, it can be written off as a business expense.
It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.
It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)
Now I use Zeal[1] to still have the documentation available offline.
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.
"The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year."
"Mozilla's long-term plan is to build its own revenue streams from subscription-based services and reduce its dependence on the Google search deal" <-- I guess MDN Plus would be one of those subscription-based services!
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...
Collection is a feature we see in more an more knowledge sharing tools. Biggest user of that feature today is probably pinterest. The two usages that you can use them for is curation and quick retrieval. If you strip the collaborative part (curation) then YOU JUST reinvent bookmarks. Congrats mdn
The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much delegated documenting how to develop against the browser platform to MDN. Microsoft explicitly I believe? This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO.
This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. How 'bout some blog posts about how you plan to get Apple, Microsoft, and Google to foot the entire bill for the operation?
Any entity will tailor the value it provides to the desires of its benefactors. So, if you would like MDN content focused on AMP, ads, and the metaverse, then this sounds like a good approach.
Always starts like that, but once they have enterprise subscriptions I can make a case for onboarding 100s of developers at a time.
I think at this point people have balanced the entire global government budget + all consumer spending against a handful of tech company's balance sheets.
It's funny nobody does this against less visible but equally powerful companies. I don't hear anyone claiming Cargill should be funding open standards ag tech.
Literally populism.
Are you sure about that? To use your example, Microsoft was one of the companies behind the launch of WebPlatform.org and the push to make it the vendor-neutral repository of documentation for Web browser tech. It eventually folded out of recognition that developer.mozilla.org was the de facto place for Web developers.*
Assertion: "When the WebPlatform.org effort folded, folks from Microsoft and elsewhere began redirecting their contributions to land on MDN."
How would you know if the previous statement were true or not? It's a collective work—formerly a wiki, and now managed through GitHub PRs.
Sell me a product, like a JavaScript book or some merch.
Or just put up the donation link. I do want to give y'all money, but a recurring subscription is too much.
A lifetime subscription for a few hundred bucks seems like it would make more sense. Or paying per use, like a cent per page. Easier for accounting and for peace of mind.
Too 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.
Now they will do whatever to be a business!
- Devdocs
- Zeal on Linux and Windows
- Dash on mac
- 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.
----
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...
---
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).
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.
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.
To me, lately Firefox has been a pain in the ass to use. Regular silent updates that forces me to restart the browser and close all my work. Saving my session doesn't always help to continue working where it was interrupted.
The latest change to the downloads is horrible. Sometimes my work requires me to download hundreds of files that I only want to open with some software for several seconds, then dismiss it. Now instead of being able to open it directly from the browser, I have to watch how everything is saved in my downloads folder and then waste my time deleting all those files manually.
I'm not paying them any money. I don't want to waste my money only to see their executives getting richer without anything in return.
I miss old Opera.
To me it's starting to feel like Windows several years ago. Features that don't bring anything new to the table but pushes their own agenda.
I've been using linux for years now and I can't be happier but I can't find a replacement to Firefox. FF is so good that even it's being sabotaged it's better than all the alternatives.
Sadly the engineering behind a browser is no joke and I don't think anybody else will create or work on an alternative to Webkit/Blink.
about:config
browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel false
What part isn't working for you?
As I said, the first thing I did when I saw the release notes was checking how to go back to the old settings. I tried that on 2 computers, both using linux (Ubuntu and PopOS), without any luck.
It doesn't ask me anymore what if I want to open the file or save it.
I hope it eventually works for you -- I also prefer the old behaviour when doing multiple downloads in quick succession.
This is the kind of change, if there were competition, I would have stopped using Firefox for good.
It doesn't work with images, videos, spreadsheet files, etc.
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.
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: