For learning, they're OK. However, most of the time when you're doing real work, what you really want is specs and complete APIs. At that point w3schools in the results becomes a distraction. I'm totally blocking them.

That's exactly my experience too. I've learnt so much from w3schools. Also being able to quickly try stuff out and tinker with it and see the effect instantly is so handy.

Yeah, as someone (re)learning modern CSS/HTML, I really don't understand the hate they get. For a beginner (at CSS/HTML anyway, I'm an HPC engineer otherwise with lots of low-level experience), I think it's a great resource, with good examples too.

I can only assume they used to be different?

In terms of the site design itself, it's always been like that - the w3schools site has always had the clean, readable presentation (and it's a pretty easy argument to make that it's much more approachable for a newbie than MDN). The main complaint was with the content. In the past there were some pretty big problems with content on w3schools. Often common footguns (of which there are many in Javascript) were not covered and newbies were encouraged to do things that were bad in the short and long term. IIRC one of the more egregious examples of this was sample code that taught developers to write code vulnerable to SQL injection. Supposedly most of this has been fixed, though I don't really use w3schools that much so I can't really vouch for its integrity or lack thereof these days.

They used to publish vulnerable code as examples without any context. For example...

XSS: https://web.archive.org/web/20060722051641/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722073110/http://www.w3scho... / https://web.archive.org/web/20060722072840/http://www.w3scho...

Unauthenticated sessions: https://web.archive.org/web/20060716141638/http://www.w3scho...

MySQL injection: https://web.archive.org/web/20110412041949/http://www.w3scho...

Nothing directly wrong with this one but prepared queries were not well understood at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20060718041049/http://www.w3scho...

They were very easy to learn from and thus widely popular, but missed critical security context.

Exactly. I do coding for hobby, just html, css, js; & in past php too. If I quickly need to find some function to do xyz or a tag or property, or to find the capabilities of some function, its params, w3schools is easy to comprehend than mdn (which very rarely I have been to).