MDN has been a huge part of my development career ever since it appeared on the internet in 2005. And the same is true for alot of you reading this today. Since that time, the Mozilla Developer Network (now Mozilla Developer Center) has become one of the largest (if not the largest) digital collection of web development documentation.
So large in fact, that in 2017, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung announced that they would shut down their own documentation projects and move all of their docs over to MDN Web Docs.
And just recently, Mozilla announced the next evolution of MDN with MDN Plus. Which I personally, am very excited about because it helps to solve a developer problem that has been around for over a decade now.
And that's the fact that the internet doesn't have a changelog. Things get deprecated and added on a daily basis and up until now, it's been nearly impossible to find out about these things until months or even years later.
Notifications
MDN Plus now let's you watch individual pages and set them to notify you when anything changes.
For example, imagine a new experimental feature not yet released to the public. While certain browsers might be able to run those features, you for sure would not want to run this code in a production environment. You can set a notification on that particular page for that exact web standard so that you can be notified when anything changes, such as the browser support.
If you are on any of the paid plans for MDN Plus, you can pretty much watch as many pages as you need to, while the free tier only allows you up to 3 pages.
Once you get a notification, you can also favorite that particular item for future reference.
To me, this is the standout feature of MDN Plus. But it only works because MDN in general does a great job of keeping documentation up to date.
Collections
MDN is massive and it can be hard to find exactly what you are looking for at times. And typically bookmarks can only get you so far before they too become lost in a maze.
MDN Plus now lets you save individual articles into collections.
Each article is automatically categorized and color-coded based on its current navigation location, which isn't as helpful as you might think.
Overall, you can't really manipulate the collection very much and I can definitely see an instance where having 40+ pages listed in a seemingly random order can hurt more than help.
I would hope that in the near future Mozilla let's developers create their own parent categories and order of importance as well.
Offline library
The offline version of MDN can only be accessible through one of the paid options (more on that below).
Pricing
MDN Plus currently offers 3-tiers of pricing, with the first tier being free essentially.
The tiers include Core (free), MDN Plus 5 ($5 monthly), and MDN Supporter 10 ($10).
From the looks of it, both paid tiers offer the exact same functionality, with the more expensive $10 tier promising future access to new features.
The free-tier is more of a trial than anything, as it is incredibly limited with only 3 notifications and 5 page saves. You'll easily use that quota up within a few minutes.
But overall, it's still a pretty affordable service, particularly if you find yourself using MDN multiple times per week.
Is it worth it?
On it's own, MDN is a treasure trove of knowledge and it has helped countless developers get through their work days time and time again. And more importantly, it's been free since its inception. And it's still free pretty much.
The new features added to the paid model aren't in any way crucial to have. But they are a good step in the right direction for Mozilla. The internet is getting more complicated by the week, more specifically, the technology powering it underneath.
And that means that development is undoubtedly going to get more difficult in the near future making MDN even more important now than ever before.
The subscription price to me is an investment in a company that is at the forefront of web standard documentation. And it's definitely something that I'm willing to spend a cup of coffee's worth per month in order to help maintain.
Per the Mozilla FAQ though, nothing on the actual MDN site is actually changing. The content will still be free for everyone and anyone.
I personally have signed up though, and if you've ever thought about MDN as something more than simply just a reference sheet, then you should consider doing the same.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
Stay up to date
Sign up for my FREE newsletter. Get informed of the latest happenings in the programming world.