Firefox’s Mozilla creates paid subscriptions for its developer service
Firefox maker Mozilla has launched a paid subscription service from its Mozilla Developer Network (MDN).
There are three new paid subscriptions starting at $5 per month – MDN Core, MDN Plus 5 and MDN Supporter 10.
New features include “Notifications” to be alerted to documentation changes, CSS feature launches and API commits, “Collections” to group information of interest, and “MDN Offline”, which uses an app Progressive Web to provide access to MDN Web Docs even when you don’t have Internet access.
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MDN Core is a limited release for developers who “want to test drive before buying a plan”.
MDN Plus 5 gives users “unrestricted access to notifications, collections, and offline MDN with new features being added all the time.” It costs $5 per month and $50 for an annual subscription.
The MDN Supporter 10 subscription costs $10 per month or $100 for an annual subscription. It gives users all the MDN Plus 5 information and “early access to new features and a direct feedback channel to the MDN team.”
Content from MDN Web Docs is always available for free. Web Docs pages are a valuable resource for web developers, providing them with a single source of information for new web technologies such as WebAssembly which bring native-like platform speeds to the browser.
Mozilla’s goal is to provide a “structured learning” experience in addition to the free Web Docs service it has pledged to continue investing in.
“Our first foray was Learning space, with the aim of providing a useful addition to the regular DND reference and guide material. In 2020, we added the first Front-end developer learning path. We’ve seen a lot of interest and engagement from users, and the Learning Zone has contributed about 10% of MDN’s monthly web traffic.” Mozilla says.
MDN Plus is open to people in the United States and Canada today, and it will arrive in the coming months in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland , UK, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.
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Mozilla has relied heavily in the past on revenue from Google, Yahoo, and Yandex through the Firefox browser. However, the number of Firefox users steadily declined as Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Vivaldi emerged.
Mozilla has laid off several hundred employees over the past two years and launched paid services like its virtual private network subscription to monetize its services.