[terminalserver]

With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable.

Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing.

Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web”

Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed, it’s not our job to document the web”

Google : “we’re a advertising company, it’s not our job to document the web”.

Facebook... etc

Amazon ... etc

And so on ...

[kojoru]

It was a concious decision in 2017 to close Google's and Microsoft's web documentation portals so that MDN can be a unified source of truth: https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...

[giancarlostoro]

I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for profit Mozilla structure is just awful.

MDN is its only gem left outside of Firefox itself, it's good they're doing this though, but only if all proceeds go primarily towards MDN itself. I can foresee people unsubscribing over funding issues if they find out Mozilla foundation is just pocketing profits from this for things outside of MDN.

[dralley]

>despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email

In 2021, there is not a chance in hell that any significant number of people are going to pay money for their web browser. At best (and this is very optimistic) it might make a few million dollars from dedicated HN-types, which is nowhere close to what Google gives them.

I actually would pay money for a Mozilla-branded email service, but running an email service isn't a walk in the park, and I expect all of the typical people would be complaining about Mozilla spending time and money on something that isn't Firefox, regardless of whether it's profitable (see also: all the complaining about Pocket).

Honestly, I wish that Mozilla had acquired Scroll (rather than Twitter) and started pushing it harder. That would be very in-line with their goals as an organization, and might eventually become a significant revenue source.

[ahtaarra]

Scroll probably would have worked well with Pocket because the former could have increased user engagement (and, in turn, help better/newer stories end up in the top posts/popular category) while in the latter support for some paywalled content-providers could be added under a single subscription system.

[Ygg2]

> I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent...

If https://servo.org/ is any measure. Probably not :(

People don't care about browsers until it's too late.

[falcolas]

Weird idea - since these big companies all voluntarily stopped documenting in favor of MDN, perhaps they should pay Mozilla for this (it's saving them money, after all).

[ratww]

They do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

[falcolas]

If Mozilla is still having to do a paid option - MDN Plus - they are obviously not getting enough. Looks like around the price of one employee for the top funders.

Unless Mozilla is suddenly operating for profit and following the ol' "why get some of the money when you can get all of the money" business model.

[sp332]

You're thinking of the Mozilla Foundation, which is not-for-profit. The Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation, which is "for-profit" and develops Firefox and MDN.

Money flows from the Corporation to the Foundation every year.

[blackoil]

They may not be for profit, but they can be inefficient enough.

[notatoad]

pretty sad state of things that the top 10 corporate contributors bottoms out at $25 in contributions.

[Macha]

The number 7 corporate donor is below the number 9 individual donor.

[hnbad]

That's not the entire story. Google still has web.dev, which blurs the line between "web platform" features and Google-specific or "experimental" features. Neither of the two actively promote MDN either (web.dev doesn't mention it even where it would make sense).

This doesn't seem as much of an intentional decision of the two corporations to promote MDN as an independent resource but more likely the result of developers working for these companies refusing to compete with MDN.

[Hamuko]

>Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web”

Or, as everyone who's ever had to look at Apple's developer documentation knows, to document their own operating system APIs.

[debacle]

I was using a WebRTC feature just yesterday that is listed as supported by Safari in modern versions of iOS all over the web. I can tell you for certain that it is 100% not.

[xixixao]

Yes, there are bugs in it that I don’t think are documented anywhere. We do have working video calling on mSafari, but we’re actively trying to kill that dependency.

[luke2m]

“As of February 2021, OWD top financial contributors are Microsoft, Google, Coil, and Igalia”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs

[Macha]

I believe they've also been contributing to the docs themselves since Google shut down their own effort (may have just been a section of web.dev?) a few years back.

[VoxPelli]

Microsoft and Google are the top financial contributors to MDN: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

[ignoramous]

Btw, Google does create a lot of content on web development (ex on webrtc.org, web.dev, html5rocks.com etc) including on various youtube GDG channels and release quite a bit of OSS reference implementations too.

[ipsum2]

Google has great web documentation, I still have this tab open from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233019

[rchowe]

Having the browser vendors write documentation might be an issue because they will all write it for their own browser.

[moron4hire]

I don't think that's the negative you think it is. It would provide a lot more clarity on how the browsers differ.

[moron4hire]

I wouldn't be including Microsoft in that list. Microsoft's own documentation is excellent.

[terminalserver]

Microsoft shut off their documentation in favor of MDN.

[moron4hire]

Well, they also put a quarter mil into MDN.

[fnord123]

So, one month of Mitchel Baker's salary.

[croes]

Have you ever looked at MS documentation of the SharePoint REST API?

[kevingadd]

How's MDN's sharepoint documentation?

The point is that the MSDN documentation for HTML and IE was quite good, and then it was deprecated in favor of MDN's superior documentation.

[colllectorof]

That's assuming that those companies want outside developers to be knowledgeable. That's a questionable assumption. If anyone here remembers how old Microsoft used to operate and why people went to get MS-something certificates you know what I mean.

"Free" documentation is often designed to give you barely enough info to start using their products, but not much more. And we're kind of used to this by now. MDN, FreeBSD hanbook or the original set of Smalltalk books stand as exceptions and reminders what things could look like if motivations were different.