Looks like there is hope for a free and open Web! Well done Mozilla!

Hope MDN becomes the go-to Wiki for the web (It practically is for me already)

Kudos to the team! :)

I wonder why they are relaunching instead of using Webplatform.Org ?

Could this eventually displace standards bodies such as WHATWG and W3C? If the Product Advisory Board of Mozilla, Google, and Samsung agree on a standard and publish it at MDN, will that become as official, at least de facto, as a standard published by W3C? I do see W3C is mentioned as a participant.

Also, for the sake of argument (and IMHO, of realism) let's assume that Google, who can virtually set web standards themselves these days, isn't doing this for a purely altruistic motive of supporting the open web. Why would they give up the 'soft power' of writing their own documentation for their own standards?

That's a good move by MS. In this context it's great to see them supporting open codecs, and for istance OGG container for audio which was recently announced as work in progress in Edge. Quite a turnaround from the old times of "best viewed with IE", ActiveX, Silverlight and etc.

Why can't MS apply same principle across all their teams? Compare the above to their push for 3D graphics API lock-in.

It distresses me that the specs on w3.org are so hard to read for the average developer. It's great to see how MDN focuses on simplicity, readability, and usable examples.

I'm glad they finally just surrendered to MDN, even if it was many years late.

[0] https://www.w3.org/2012/10/webplatform.html.en

One of our guiding principles in developing Microsoft Edge is that end users should never have to worry about which sites work in which browsers. This philosophy—”the Web should just work for everyone“—led to our choice to target the “interoperable intersection” of web APIs in our browser engineering.

It wasn't favorite because I agree with it. It was favorite for the humor value of Microsoft accepting a principle that flies so strongly in the face of how the company established itself, managed its battles with competitors, and tried to sabotage existing web standards for most of my professional life.

I'm glad they are finally claiming to be on board. I'll trust them as far as I can throw them. (Guess how far I can throw 120k people...)

Related, when I was active in standards work (I learned just how badly that stuff was run) I discovered that new people in a standards group that was being formed would be lobbying to be the group Chairperson or Vice Chair. But the people who had been in standards bodies before were all vying to be the Editor. That was because the group could argue all they wanted but at the end of the day what was in the standard was what was in the document and only one person had absolute sway over that, the Editor.

So when I see all these leading lights, who just got through a rancorous debate about DRM with the standards body, endorse a new way to capture the "actual" standard, I see a seasoned standards wonk offering to do all the slavish work of editing the documents so that everyone else can focus on the hard work of coming up with the best possible standard.

It was awesome. You could hit F1 and it would instantly pop up good, detailed, documentation for whatever method or keyword was under your cursor. In any of their developer products, so it worked as well in SQL Server Management Studio as in VS.NET. Every language, every technology, updated monthly via Automatic Updates on your dev box.

But they stopped shipping it in favor of "web help". That's the thing where you hit F1 and it spends several seconds opening a web browser (a custom one in a new tab in the IDE for some reason), then several more seconds opening a "meet the mouse" style page telling you how to use the code editor window (which it had helpfully detected was your context when asking for help).

So in one stroke, they switched from the worlds most awesome help system at your fingertips to "just go open Chrome and type your search into Google, since that will at least get you something relevant".

Today, they've improved that workflow by trying to ensure that something relevant exists on MDN, provided you're searching for web-related stuff.

We're still about 10 years back from the state-of-the-art in 2003.

Shame.

However I think we should all be skeptical of any actions corporations take today until proven otherwise. When 60,000 Americans are dying of opiods per year (that's all the deaths in Vietnam per year) and drug companies will reject calls to regulate them and pay off members of Congress, some constant skepticism is called for (who could of believed they would do that??) https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...

1. The people working on these browsers are just that: people. They haven't necessarily been e.g. at Microsoft when IE vs. Netscape was a thing, and probably don't hold grudges. They were hired to work with the web, not against it.

2. There was a lot of duplicate efforts, and MDN was clearly "winning". That's a waste of time.

3. A more "neutral" MDN (although I think they've been doing a pretty good job already) is good for all browser makers. Even if Mozilla and its volunteers are trying to be a non-biased resource, they'll always be writing from their own viewpoint.

4. For Mozilla, MDN being less Mozilla-/Firefox-focused might not sound like a great option, but Mozilla's mission is to build a better, free and open internet, not to be dominant. (Incidentally, that's also the reason MDN "won": this made it able to attract many contributors and supporters.)

how's the content added though? its missing so many libraries i use...

Are we now asking Google et al to be the gatekeepers of what is deemed correct and useful because they have a preferred alternative that fits with our view on the world?

W3Schools may not have the best historic reputation, but it still has a place in relevant search results.

I have personally used MDN extensively over the years, and love it for what it is.

Web specs recently have sacrificed the former to handle the latter, not least because past experience with web specs that sacrificed the latter to do the former was so horrible...

If you are on Windows or Linux, then Zeal and Velocity are basically the same thing (they're only available on platforms where Dash isn't). Zeal's search used to be pretty bad, but at least you have the option to send Pull Requests on GitHub.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mdnjump/mfjekjhknp...

Modern web companies don't make money from the web, they make money from something you do while you're on the web. The less the web costs to use (in the broadest possible sense of cost), the more people will use it, the more money they will make.

That's why Facebook's trying to pay off Indian ISPs, and Google's pouring money into web browsers and internet balloons. Microsoft came late to this party because their original make-money-from-the-OS model meant they were trying to compete using the browser, but now that they have a cloud strategy like everyone else, the law of complements has turned them into good web citizens too. Thanks, Satya!

> The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been discontinued. This site is now available on github

https://webplatform.github.io/docs/

Edge also supports Apple's Live streaming tech so, again the only browser on Windows which can be used to watch Apple's Live events.

Too bad that Edge won't ever be on Linux.

Looking from a non-Windows-user perspective, in the last couple of years: VSCode is now a thing, .NET is open sourced, they've started financially supporting organization that I like (like OSI and the Linux foundation), Powershell is now available on my platform, and, if I ever decide to switch back to Microsoft's technologies (highly unlikely), I have Windows Subsystem for Linux and I'll be able to run Linux servers on Azure.

As a non-Windows user, I'm totally happy with this new Microsoft.