MDN Web Docs, previouslyMozilla Developer Network and formerlyMozilla Developer Center, is a documentation repository and learning resource forweb developers. It was started byMozilla in 2005[2] as a unified place for documentation about open web standards, Mozilla's own projects, and developer guides.[3]
MDN Web Docs content is maintained by Mozilla, Google employees, and volunteers (community of developers and technical writers). It also contains content contributed byMicrosoft,Google, andSamsung who, in 2017, announced they would shut down their own web documentation projects and move all their documentation to MDN Web Docs.[4] Topics includeHTML5,JavaScript,CSS,Web APIs,Django,Node.js,WebExtensions,MathML, and others.[5]
In 2005,Mozilla Corporation started the project under the name Mozilla Developer Center,[2] and still funds the servers and staff of its projects.
The initial content for the website was provided byDevEdge, for which the Mozilla Foundation was granted a license byAOL.[6][2] The site now contains a mix of content migrated from DevEdge and mozilla.org, as well as original and more up-to-date content.[7][8] Documentation was also migrated from XULPlanet.com.
On Oct 3, 2016,Brave browser added Mozilla Developer Network as one of its default search engines options.[9]
In 2017, MDN Web Docs became the unified documentation of web technology for Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Mozilla.[4][10] Microsoft started redirecting pages fromMicrosoft Developer Network to MDN.[11]
In 2019, Mozilla started Beta testing a new reader site for MDN Web Docs written inReact (instead ofjQuery; some jQuery functionality was replaced with Cheerio library).[12] The new site was launched on December 14, 2020.[13] Since December 14, 2020, all editable content is stored in a Git repository hosted onGitHub, where contributors open pull requests and discuss changes.[14]
On January 25 2021,[15] the Open Web Docs (OWD) organization was launched as a non-profit fiscal entity to collect funds for MDN development.[16] As of March 2023[update], the top financial contributors of OWD areGoogle,Microsoft,Igalia,Canva, andJetBrains.[17]
In March 2022, MDN launched a redesign with a new logo[18] and a paid subscription called MDN Plus.[19]
^"OWD Steering Committee call, 2021-01-20".GitHub. January 20, 2021. Archived from the original on September 20, 2021. RetrievedFebruary 1, 2021.OWD will go public on Monday, January 25th.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
