
MDN Web Docs

MDN Web Docs, previously Mozilla Developer Network and formerly Mozilla Developer Center, is a documentation repository and learning resource for web developers used by Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung. The project was started by Mozilla in 2005 as a unified place for documentation about open web standards, Mozilla's own projects, and developer guides. In 2017, Microsoft, Google, and Samsung announced that they would shut down their own documentation projects and move all their documentation to MDN Web Docs.
MDN Web Docs content is maintained by Mozilla and Google employees and volunteers (community of developers and technical writers). Topics include HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Web APIs, Django, Node.js, WebExtensions, MathML, and others.
History.
In 2005, Mozilla Corporation started the project under the name Mozilla Developer Center. Mozilla Corporation still funds servers and employs staff working on the projects.
The initial content for the website was provided by DevEdge, for which the Mozilla Foundation was granted a license by AOL. The site now contains a mix of content migrated from DevEdge and mozilla.org, as well as original and more up-to-date content. 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.
In 2017, MDN Web Docs became the unified documentation of web technology for Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Microsoft started redirecting pages from MSDN to MDN.
In 2019, Mozilla started Beta testing a new reader site for MDN Web Docs written in React (instead of jQuery; some jQuery functionality was replaced with Cheerio library). The new site was launched on December 14, 2020. Since December 14, 2020, all editable content is stored in a git repository hosted on GitHub, where contributors open pull requests and discuss changes.
On January 25 2021, Open Web Docs organization was launched as a non-profit fiscal entity to collect funds for MDN development. As of February 2021, OWD top financial contributors are Microsoft, Google, Coil, and Igalia.