[atopal]

We made that change around 2017. Mozilla Developer Network is somewhat ambiguous. In surveys and user interviews people were confused about the name. Web developers thought it might be a resource specifically for Mozilla developers, which to be fair was the focus in the earlier days. The web platform documentation was just one part of many Mozilla related things documented on MDN for some time. In 2017 though the web platform documentation had grown to make up 95% of MDN's traffic and it had become clear that it was not primarily a resource for Mozilla developers anymore, the name change to "MDN Web Docs" was intended to reflect that change in focus.

[susam]

When the expansion of the first letter of an acronym becomes obsolete, I think it is a good opportunity to turn the acronym into a recursive acronym, e.g., MDN = MDN Developer Network.

[patze]

This reminds me on the recursive XNA acronym which stands for “XNA’s not acronymed”.

[38]

or instead of being a troll, you could just remove the pointless extra letter:

DN = Developer Network

[Forricide]

This is a super interesting anecdote, considering the name definitely confused me at the time - trying to learn web development with no context I did indeed think it was some kind of Mozilla-centric resource. All those times using w3schools over MDN are, in hindsight, a little sad aha.

[DonHopkins]

Not as much as the names ExpertsExchange.com and PenIsland.com confused me!

[soperj]

> Mozilla Developer Network is somewhat ambiguous

MDN is less ambiguous?

[mort96]

Yeah. MDN is just a name, you learn what MDN means and you know it, like you learned what Apple means or what Windows means. "Mozilla Developer Network" sounds more like a description that you're supposed to interpret the meaning of, and one natural interpretation is the network for Mozilla developers, and another is that it's a network for people developing for Mozilla platforms, maybe to do with Firefox add-ons.

I'd maybe call it "misleading" more than "ambiguous" but meh.

[ttepasse]

I was always surprised that the browser oligopoly together with the W3C already had started building a site for web platform docs - webplatform.org - and then just mothballed that in favour of MDN. Seemed weird.

Snapshot: https://webplatform.github.io

[thayne]

Is that supposed to be for all the browsers? I always thought it was specifically for chrome and sponsored just by google. But maybe the bias towards chrome is part of why MDN became more prevalent.

[wruza]

Scrolled through few articles and it feels as useless restyled copy of w3schools or a similar site. Which are already less useful than MDN.

[stevage]

Huh, thanks for the explanation.

I always understood it by analogy with MSDN so it wasn't confusing to me at all.