Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

by toggle • 11 years ago

357 183 11 years ago

bugzilla.mozilla.org

sp3329• 11 years ago

This bug report is not really clear. Does the submitter consider it bloat, or a privacy violation, or what? It should be obvious that the way it appears in Developer Edition (two releases ahead of "release") is not the way it will appear in the final version. This report should be about the way the feature is explained to the user, or about how hard it is to disable the feature, so that it can be improved.

yarrel• 11 years ago

"Mozilla's recent integration with Pocket, a proprietary third-party service, is a mistake."

This seems perfectly clear. The obvious improvement is to remove it.

What is wrong with Mozilla at the moment?

sp3329• 11 years ago

I guess I'm just missing the point. The recommended action is to move Pocket to an extension that might even be shipped with the browser. I just don't see how it's different from "integrating" with the browser in that case. If the privacy implications were better explained and it was easier to disable, what would the problem be?

bhrgunatha• 11 years ago

What is wrong with Mozilla at the moment?

I keep asking myself the same question. With so many releases of firefox I seem to have to spend my time searching for a way to remove or disable many of the features they push. I think the problem is this: browsers are quiet mature in terms of features, so now to innovate they need to force features that don't really belong in the browser. Either fix the pitiful state of bookmark management in your browser or let the add-on take the burden.

mhurron• 11 years ago

It should be obvious that the way it appears in Developer Edition (two releases ahead of "release") is not the way it will appear in the final version

It appears that it looks that way in release as well. (Showed up in 38.0.5 on my Mac this morning, not in 38.0.1 on my Fedora desktop)

I do agree with the bug report, it's inclusion in the core product is a bug that should be removed. An extension is the right place to put this.

drdaeman• 11 years ago

What's about Developer Edition? I have "regular" edition, and after the recent update it greeted me with a page about Pocket integration being built-in.

While I do use Pocket, I honestly don't like the direction Mozilla took.

sp3329• 11 years ago

It was mentioned in the middle of the bug report. I didn't realize the feature had shipped already.

Albright• 11 years ago

At least in my opinion, it's unnecessary bloat - just like that video chat thing they added a couple months ago.

Remember when Firefox, the lean, scrappy browser, first came out and ran circles around the bloated Netscape browser/HTML editor/IM client/mail client/newsreader? The Firefox team seems to have forgotten.

If anyone is maintaining a "Firefox: Browser Only Edition" fork, I'd love to know about it so I could use that instead.

RubyPinch• 11 years ago

icecat, follows gnu teachings

waterfox, pale moon, also exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-bas...

Manishearth4• 11 years ago

Neither Hello nor Pocket will add performance bloat AFAICT. Hello leverages existing web features (webrtc), and Pocket I just an API call.

With the customizable UI you can put these things out of sight too.

Firefox does have bloat, but these two are very minor compared to the bloaty bits.

drummer32• 11 years ago

This is not about bloat. Mozilla was already developing read-it-later functionality for Firefox. In fact it's already on mobile versions. Hello and Pocket have almost no overhead because they are just APi calls to external services. This is about Mozilla endorsing thrid-party proprietary services.

bharad• 11 years ago

I am a Firefox user and also a Pocket user. I am on the same lines as the author. Pocket should not be bundled into Firefox. It should be an extension (hint: featured extension).

MisterWebz• 11 years ago

It is so unlike Mozilla to introduce something like that, I ran a virus scan and checked what programs had been installed recently -- I assumed it had been put there in the same way that IE users used to get the Ask Toolbar installed.

Exactly how I felt. What the hell were they thinking? I'm generally very supportive of Mozilla, I even supported their initiative to put advertisements on Firefox's start page. But bundling stuff like Pocket and Hello with Firefox is just ridiculous. Why not make it an official extension? That way users can easily disable or remove it.

sp3329• 11 years ago

Is there a practical difference between disabling the features and just ignoring them?

pc2g4d4• 11 years ago

Memory and CPU utilization for starters

brador• 11 years ago

Was money on the table to integrate Pocket into Firefox? Like with the default search engine payments Mozilla receives.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

Almost certainly.

Puts• 11 years ago

You really start to wonder what pot they are smoking over there at Mozilla. Standard things you would expect from a browser, like a way to easily disabling javascript are apparently left to third-party extensions, because oh you don't want to bloat the browser. But hey, video conferencing on the other hand is such an essential part of the browsing experience.

sp3329• 11 years ago

They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages, and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox wasn't working. http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

untog• 11 years ago

Standard things you would expect from a browser, like a way to easily disabling javascript

That is very far from being an expectation of the average user.

justizin• 11 years ago

Could we avoid associating pot smoking with poor decisions? There's no science backing that up. ;)

squids• 11 years ago

Disabling javascript is fairly easy on a page by page basis, right click on the page, inspect element to bring up the console, click on the settings cog, scroll down, disable javascript tickbox.

cmdrfred• 11 years ago

I always get devoted when I support chrome on here but I think history will prove me right.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

Hello is just a thin wrapper around WebRTC. That's why Chrome can receive Hello calls without an extension. There's barely anything to add on in that case.

xg153• 11 years ago

Not many resources perhaps, but a lot of additional UI surface, which clutters up the menus with irrelevant options.

serf• 11 years ago

The problem isn't the size, the problem is that it adds features which are outside the scope of 'a Browser'.

jtgeibel2• 11 years ago

This completely captures my response as well. I run on the beta channel, so the day after 38.0 stable hit, this got rolled out the the beta channel. I checked the plugin/addon page and my user profile directory at least a dozen times, assuming that something unwanted had done this behind my back. I probably wasted half an hour looking into this. Finally, I took a (second) look at the release notes before actually realizing that this was something build in. (I missed it the first time because it didn't even register that they would be doing this.) What really shocked me was that it was added by default to standard toolbar, which seemed rather rude and presumptuous. (Maybe they rolled this out differently to the stable channel, I don't know.)

Worst of all, there has been almost no communication on this. I subscribe to Planet Mozilla and read everything that seems interesting to me, and I still didn't know this was coming. There still hasn't been much public discussion on this. On top of that, they did a weird 38.0.5 release cycle that I haven't seen before with the release train. It was almost like someone said: "there is no way we can introduce this to enterprise with an ESR release, so lets tweak the whole release model so we can shove it in everyone else's face once we spin the ESR release."

I've been a huge Mozilla supporter since back in the Pheonix days. I'm even okay with their ad ambitions (so far) and think that they made the right pragmatic decision with regards to DRM support. However, with this move I've now felt it necessary to take a step back and seriously question their motives. It just seems so far out of character. I've been thinking and reading about this for the last 3 weeks and I still have no idea what they are thinking.

Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm a huge Firefox Sync fan. The fact that they took such a user focused approach to encrypting everything client side, and minimizing their server-side exposure to user data seemed like such a principled approach and is probably the only thing that kept me from taking the leap to Chrome at a time when there were noticeable performance benefits to doing so. This integration seems like the exact antithesis.

browser4• 11 years ago

In my view, they need to reverse course 180 degrees on things like Pocket and Hello, or it will be the beginning of the end for Firefox.

Firefox is a niche product that appeals to the privacy-consciuos. Stuff like Pocket and Telefonica/Hello basically eliminates its reason for being.

I have Firefox as my main browser now, but I won't keep it around for long if I have to swat down new marketing integrations in every new release.

gcb03• 11 years ago

that hits home. because there was a malware that distributed itself as a mozilla add-on. even sent in patches because it affected a bank i used.

gluxon2• 11 years ago

The "Mozilla Manifesto and Pocket" email thread in the Firefox Dev mailing list gives some insight from the developers. [1]

To paraphrase: it seems they wanted a reading list feature but found it pointless to re-implement an existing solution with many desired features. (Work which was started but appears to have been scrapped.) This rationalized piggy-backing on Pocket. It gives Firefox a reading list for its users without Mozilla having to maintain it.

My personal problem with this has more to do with the anti-competitive nature of integrating services rather than Pocket's closed source.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firefox-dev/B3jJq_kU...

derefr4• 11 years ago

It somewhat makes sense. If they want it that badly, though, maybe Mozilla should buy Pocket so that they can put it under the aegis of their license/philosophical charter. "Reading List" is currently right up there with "Web Browser" and "Email Client" as major programs that I would like to be neutrally owned by a public foundation.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

It would have been cool to have an API for plugins to hook in their "save this url" logic and UI callbacks. That way Mozilla control the core experience and any plugin can implement it like an interface. They could even ship with Pocket installed by default, just as a plugin implementing the same interfaces everyone else can.

I guess the "list URLs" side of things might be an awkward abstraction, although it'd let you merge multiple services which could be cool too. I use IFTTT to move starred pocket items to Evernote, so that'd be one possible use case if Evernote also implemented it.

miscellaneous• 11 years ago

I for one don't use Pocket because they have a very poor privacy policy. For me the integration of a 3rd-part service like Pocket goes against everything Firefox says it stands for: free, open, and private internet.

I was enjoying the Firefox reading-list feature because it allowed me to save webpages and sync across my devices without having to put all that information into a proprietary 3rd party service. I thought the reading-list was one of the best features added to Firefox for years, and now they have scraped it. I really can't understand how Mozzilla executives came to the conclusion that this was a good idea.

pdkl953• 11 years ago

Why not make it an official extension?

It says a lot about Mozilla when they decide to bundle fad features like these after spending years stripping existing features[1] out of Firefox. During their effort to dumb-down[2] Firefox, it was common to hear that removing those features didn't matter, as they should be provided by extensions instead. Apparently that cheap excuse is ignored when the feature when it is convenient to do so.

[1] the many options cut from the preferences dialog comes to mind - some that I have had to help a LOT of friends work around. Far too many man-weeks have been wasted ;_;

[2] which was a terrible idea that hurts the enthusiast that actually used those feature, hinders the inexperienced-but-interested users by hiding previously visible features behind the addons.mozilla.org, and doesn't do anything at all for the supposed target audience of non-technical users who by definition don't even use the preferences dialog.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1172/

CarloSanta42• 11 years ago

They bundele it because they get payed for it. Same story with the new suggested site advertising. The alarming thing is that this way Mozilla is loosing it's independency.

glass-2• 11 years ago

This is Mozilla gaining independency. When they were completely reliant on Google they had no independency.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

As repeatedly said elsewhere in this thread, Pocket is not paying Mozilla for this integration.

pc2g4d4• 11 years ago

A nicely written complaint about the inclusion of Pocket in the Firefox browser. The tone was respectful, but clear about the philosophical and technological flaws in the inclusion of Pocket.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

I agree, it was very well written. I wish all requests from users were this respectful.

ethana• 11 years ago

What I don't understand is that Firefox also include its own read later service that sync to Firefox users account. Are they planning to drop its own implementation and partner with Pocket?

sp3329• 11 years ago

It has a read later service? There's a new Readability button but it doesn't seem to sync anything. Edit: according to chimeracoder, there was one in Nightly for a little while but it was removed.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

I answered this on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/388ryl/pocket_and_h...

hobarrera2• 11 years ago

They already have the infrastructure and the tech. It'd just be like syncing bookmarks. Only less metadata. I can't think this would take more than a couple of days to implement for someone already on that proyect.

jkaptur• 11 years ago

I really like both Firefox and Pocket, but I can't imagine a good reason for them to be integrated at this level. I searched for what justification has been offered and found [1]. I'd love to read something more informative and convincing.

[1] http://www.planet-libre.org/?post_id=18514

sp3329• 11 years ago

Thank you, that link answers a lot of questions.

azakai5• 11 years ago

I think the reason is to make them available to users. If they were in an addon, most users would never hear about it, and even if they did, many users don't know how to install addons.

There is data showing that Firefox users like the feature and benefit from it. Given that, adding it to the browser makes sense.

hrjet2• 11 years ago

By that logic, why not bundle all the popular addons with Firefox? Why only a chosen few?

firasd2• 11 years ago

This trend of Firefox increasingly bundling more services and features is an interesting paradox considering that Firefox started as a quiet project to make a slimmed down, no frills browser in comparison to the main Mozilla browser.

I’ve recently resumed using Firefox as my main browser partly driven by support of the project but also because Chrome was taking too much RAM and causing performance issues. Of course, when Chrome first came out it was a very slimmed down browser that used a lot less RAM compared to Firefox. Everything moves in cycles…

cpeterso4• 11 years ago

Phoenix/Firefox was Mozilla's own lightweight alternative to SeaMonkey. Then Chrome was the lightweight alternative to a memory-hogging Firefox. Now Chrome is seen as sluggish and a memory hog. Where do we go next?

wvenable• 11 years ago

Servo, when it's done. And from there, who knows!

firasd2• 11 years ago

I suppose, as far as the web platform is concerned, we aren't really going to replace HTML/CSS/JS so increasing the speed and memory management of javascript rendering is the clear way forward, e.g. with Servo https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/

hackmiester• 11 years ago

...back to Seamonkey? :D

cwyers3• 11 years ago

Microsoft Edge?

zanny2• 11 years ago

There are a lot of alternative browsers, though almost all of them use Blink.

steve-howard• 11 years ago

I use Firefox because Tree Style Tab[1] is such a useful interface for me that I'm willing to put up with the annoyances. I had the same thought about the new widgets popping up, though. There is really no reason at all that Pocket can't have been shipped as an extension, at worst a pre-installed one (but why exactly was that necessary to begin with?).

I want a browser that does what I want, supports the add-ons I prefer, and stays out of the way. Hopefully Firefox doesn't continue to make me remove "features" with every update.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

maqr• 11 years ago

What's the best way to make this more prominent for Mozilla to see?

I made a bugzilla account and added my name to the CC list, but is there anything else I can do to help this get more recognition?

sp3329• 11 years ago

It hasn't even been triaged yet. I'd wait to see what the devs' initial response is before worrying that it's not getting attention.

Edit: ah, here we go https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126#c2

fredoralive2• 11 years ago

I do love the way Mozilla basically say "Bugzilla isn't the place to discuss things like this, you should discuss this down in Usenet, behind the sign that says 'beware the leopard'" for any controversial decision.

scott_karana• 11 years ago

Add yourself to the CC list to endorse this ticket, without cluttering up the thread with needless "I agree" posts! :-)

mordocai2• 11 years ago

Done, thanks for the tip. I wasn't sure the best way to show that I agree with the bug. I also voted for the bug.

cpeterso4• 11 years ago

When you add yourself to a bug's CC list, every other person CC'd on the bug is sent a "bugmail" notification that you are now CC'd. If you just vote for the bug, you can receive bugmail notification without spamming all the other CCs. That's what I do. :)

me_bx• 11 years ago

Too bad I'm reading this after commenting.

I saw the CC list, but I assumed this would subscribe me to email notifications about this bug, which I don't want to receive.

I'd like to fix this, but it seems like cutting-edge bugzilla doesn't have a "delete comment" feature...

mccr82• 11 years ago

Yes, the CC list will subscribe you to email notifications about the bug, and does not really indicate support, only interest in receiving email notifications about the bug.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

Actually the "vote" link should be used for endorsement.

chimeracoder2• 11 years ago

Since all of the comments on this page so far seem to be opposed to the integration:

I love Firefox's "Reader View". It's the only way that some pages are readable on my desktop or mobile device, because so many websites try to hijack scrolling, insert modal overlays and ads, or do all sorts of things that make it unbelievably frustrating to just read static text.

On the other hand, Reader View lacks a sync feature. There was one for a few days in Nightly, but it was buggy for the short time it existed, and it was removed.

I was hoping Firefox would improve the sync feature and bring it back eventually, but in all honesty, this is way better. The work that goes into making a seamless, syncing reader view is not trivial[0], and it makes more sense for Mozilla to focus on building a browser than to reinvent the wheel when Pocket already exists and works incredibly well with the same use case.

As for whether this should be "bundled" into the browser vs. an extension: I agree that it would be nicer philosophically if Pocket were a preinstalled extension. On the other hand, Firefox Hello is literally a preinstalled extension with no special integration or privileges (other than being preinstalled), and still some people made the same complaint about it when it launched[1]. So I take that complaint with a grain of salt.

And as for the performance impact of either, I'd have to see some data demonstrating that this actually leads to an appreciable (let alone measurable) increase in memory or CPU usage to be convinced that simply not using it is not an acceptable alternative.

[0] it may look that way, but there are a lot of corner cases

[1] From what I understand, Firefox Hello is simply an extension that leverages WebRTC features already built into the browser to enable video chat (with the assistance of a service provided by Telefonica, which assists in the routing).

abrowne3• 11 years ago

I don't mind using Pocket as the backend, but I want it to work more like Android's Reading List (and the reading list that was available briefly in desktop Nightly).

I want articles to

• be readable (and savable) offline;

• open in Firefox's Reader View, not Pocket's site;

• sync with Android Fx's Reading List, not (just) the Android Pocket app.

chimeracoder2• 11 years ago

I want all of those same things too. I imagine that this is just the first step to getting all of those things working, since doing basically any of that well requires sync working. Now that Pocket is providing the sync (which is the hardest part), the rest is much easier to implement.

GeorgeHahn2• 11 years ago

Do you know what happened to the reading list that existed in Nightly for a while?

sp3329• 11 years ago

The built-in Reader view is based on code from Readability http://readability.com/ If you install the actual Readability add-on, it has a "Read Later" feature. This addresses abrowne's first two bullet points.

untitaker_• 11 years ago

Firefox Hello is literally a preinstalled extension with no special integration or privileges

It is literally not, at least I don't see an entry in the addons or extensions menus on Firefox 38.0.5.

and it makes more sense for Mozilla to focus on building a browser than to reinvent the wheel when Pocket already exists and works incredibly well with the same use case.

Now they coexist: Firefox for Android has a reading list that does not sync with anything while Pocket is a third-party service without the end-to-end encryption I've come to love from Firefox Sync.

zanny2• 11 years ago

Firefox Hello is not the integration of a proprietary 3rd party service.

My problem with pocket is that I can trust Firefox Sync, because its code is open and if I were to doubt its security, I could audit it, either myself or contribute to an official audit.

I can never do that to pocket. Its a black box to me, I have no idea what they are doing with my browsing history, and therefor I can never trust it.

Its a huge sin on Mozilla's part, a company who keeps promising privacy, to sell off some of our most personal data - browser sync data - to a third party proprietary web service.

Manishearth4• 11 years ago

Uh, no, Pocket's client side code is open.

The most you need to be worried about is Pocket reading the list of sites saved to your Pocket.

baby• 11 years ago

I can understand how some users are frustrated by that but here's my point of view:

I found this pocket thing to be pretty amazing and I never understood why browsers never integrated such a thing natively. I tried some other solutions before (I can't remember the names) and it never worked for me. They were either badly made or not well integrated in the browser. But this pocket thing. It's just seamless, I save pages here and I read them later on my phone in the subway. That's all I ever wanted from a browser.

Seriously, firefox+pocket+treestyletab is all I wanted.

Maybe integrate the new microsoft browser features where you can draw on a page to share that and that would be perfect.

mordocai2• 11 years ago

This bug report has been closed, we have been told to report this elsewhere. There are already many posts on their feedback forum, I haven't seen one on their governance forum.

Animats2• 11 years ago

I keep turning all that stuff off, and wonder if I missed anything. I don't want Firefox "social integration". I don't want "Pocket" in the browser. I don't want "Hello" snooping on my contact information. I don't want Yahoo (Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider.

Someone may have to fork Firefox. It's still open source, more or less.

dblohm722• 11 years ago

Hello snooping on your contact information? Where on earth did you get that idea from?

ploxiln• 11 years ago

He probably just assumed it did, like all other chat services.

Whether it does or doesn't, if it's not installed, then you don't need to worry about it. I'm quite annoyed that firefox is adding more cruft, more buttons, more features. Just like phones and operating systems, I now first go to the hidden places necessary to turn off apps/buttons/features that aren't needed and needlessly clutter and the interface, slow down the system, and cause unexpected issues. Then I add the extensions required to get the power-user settings/tweaks which actually should be there.

It is VERY FRUSTRATING that the trend is solidly in the direction of removing "scary" relevant settings and adding crap features, and in many areas, there is no longer a good option for people like me who know what the fuck they're doing. Modern "products" waste more and more of my time.

Animats2• 11 years ago

From the Mozilla web site. It's difficult to find, though.

Mozilla has a Firefox Hello Terms of Service:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox-hell...

which claims to link to the Firefox Hello privacy terms, but actually links to the main Mozilla privacy page:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/

which, in a sidebar, links to the Firefox Hello privacy policy:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-hello/

which links to the TokBox privacy policy:

https://tokbox.com/support/privacy-policy

which says:

"We use the information we collect from you in the following ways: ... To organize and carry out TokBox’s marketing or promotional operations/offers, contests, games and similar events."

One of Hello's basic functions, at least in its mobile forms, is to cross-reference your phone contacts and Facebook contacts. See "Review: “Hello” Facebook Dialer, Bye to Your Privacy?"[1]

So, yes, it snoops on your contact information.

[1] http://www.xda-developers.com/review-hello-facebook-dialer-b...

foobargarply• 11 years ago

I'm switching to IceCat. It's a GNU maintained fork, but is a few versions behind. I trust GNU more than Mozilla, but you still have to trust Mozilla to some extent if you use any Firefox fork.

glass-2• 11 years ago

I don't want Yahoo (Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider.

I don't want Google as the search provider, and you'll find many people who don't want Bing or DuckDuckGo as the search provider. That doesn't leave many options.

ta0967• 11 years ago

mozilla, meet sourceforge.

pc2g4d4• 11 years ago

The Bugzilla ticket has been closed and people are instead being pointed at a corresponding post on the Mozilla Governance mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2...

That's probably the most productive place to directly contribute to the official conversation.

BUT it also seems that the Pocket integration wasn't previously discussed on that mailing list. At least, that's what my cursory search seems to show: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.governanc...

It makes me wonder whether mozilla.governance is really where these sorts of decisions get made....

(Note: cpeterso already posted the mozilla.governance link but I felt it deserved a top-level entry.)

gluxon2• 11 years ago

It was brought up in the Firefox Dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firefox-dev/B3jJq_kU...

I do agree that the discussion should have been in the Mozilla Governance mailing list though.

Siecje• 11 years ago

What is the difference between using Pocket and a bookmark?

DonGateley• 11 years ago

Indeed! I've asked this a couple of places and got no answer. If it is functionally equivalent to dragging the address to a bookmark-bar folder called Pocket I become very suspicious of motives.

SwellJoe2• 11 years ago

I was similarly confused, and still kinda am confused. Many people seem to find it valuable beyond bookmarks, but I don't really get it.

What I have been able to glean is that it re-renders the pages you save to your pocket in a more "readable" way, and it looks more like a newspaper or magazine or Medium blog post. Less clutter, more focus on content, at least that's the goal.

I have my doubts about this being valuable enough to make it a standard feature. I did whatever one has to do to opt-in when it showed up in the Developer version...I thought it was a new Mozilla thing, which I'm always willing to check out. I was disappointed, and surprised, that it was not a Mozilla thing. That wasn't made clear, I don't think, in the description of what I was opting into.

I feel a little misled by it, actually, and I don't think it's something I want to use going forward, but I'm not sure how to opt back out. The UI is confusing, to me.

abrowne3• 11 years ago

A reading list, be it a feature or service, has a workflow suited to easily add and remove articles and view them as a simple list. You can do this with bookmarks — and I do at the moment because it's the best way I've found to sync between Fx on desktop and Android — but there's more friction when managing articles.

pdkl953• 11 years ago

Surveillance of the users' reading lists, obviously.

Thats what a very large part of the computer industry means when they talk about "monetizing" all of the "big data" they suddenly have. Go back over the last ~decade of goods and services made by internet-related businesses, and you can see a clear trend towards turning features that used to be stand-alone (browser bookmarks), into "free" services. Often this makes the product mildly worse (latency, uptime), which is then lampshaded with a minor feature like bookmark-syncing (which could be done in other ways that do not betray the contents to a 3rd party).

If you have any doubt about anything I just said, I recommend watching the talk I've been suggesting lately by Aral Balkan ( https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html... ). If it wasn't obvious why Pocket was being pushed instead of improving bookmarks, then Aral's talk might just terrify you.

ChrisGranger• 11 years ago

This page http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h... purports to tell you how to disable Pocket for Firefox, yet all it does is remove the button from the toolbar. Searching "pocket" in about:config reveals numerous preferences that can be edited, including browser.pocket.enabled which remains set to true after following Pocket's instructions.

gcb03• 11 years ago

why stop there?

- telefonica service for voice chat.

- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the browser?)

Spittie• 11 years ago

- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

I don't really like it either, but that's not how it works. Firefox downloads an updated list of "non-safe" sites from Google every 30 minutes or so, and check sites against the local copy. A site get sent to Google only if there is a match in the local copy, to check that it's still "blacklisted"

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

It's for casting videos to a Chromecast, not for streaming videos. It seems to be possible to build Firefox without it, F-Droid does so: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=fennec&fdid=...

- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the browser?)

I don't like it neither, but I think a small blob for DRM is better than a whole closed addon. It's awful that it got pushed to every installation tho, instead of displaying a "download" button on Netflix and similar sites.

As for your question, it seems that tons of people do so.

gcb03• 11 years ago

OK so they advertise some sites you visit to Google, not all as i said.

removing Google services: fdroid goes to great pains to do that. i was actually doing that myself before. have you ever tried? it's hours and hours wasted changing code and scripts that were originally made optional but for some reason they drippe dropped the checks (I'm still to have enough time to track the commits that did this)

drm:agree with you there, no excuse not to be a download.

GeorgeHahn2• 11 years ago

What happened to the native Reading List? It was in Nightly for a time, but it appears to have disappeared recently.

I love Pocket, but I was looking forward to migrating to a setup where my data was kept private.

zobzu• 11 years ago

Fuck yeah. Remove this crap. Never do it again.

Colleague working at mozilla showed me an internal email where the CEO says they checked metrics and Tiles and Pocket did not affect Firefox, and that their survey indicates people are okay with it.

This seems like total bs... I don't know anybody - including fx devs - that think its a good idea. In fact earlier versions of fxnightly had their own, not-pocket version that used sync as a backend.

anonymousab• 11 years ago

Why couldn't it have been a bundled extension? Heck, add the option to turn it on to the update page.

At the very least it would allow people to remove it easily and entirely.

netdog• 11 years ago

A remembrance of Zawinski's law seems apropos here.

imrehg• 11 years ago

Bugzilla is not for discussion of product decisions.

That sounds like a very arbitrary distinction, and an argument of convenience. Every line of code that gets into a software is a product decision one way or another...

paulmd2• 11 years ago

I did my part: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172218

Even though it will cost me a buttload of time to rebuild all my cookies: fuck Mozilla, when did they turn into SourceForge?

SwellJoe2• 11 years ago

I opted-in on the basis that I thought it was a Mozilla thing. I'm always willing to try new Mozilla things because I trust Mozilla completely. Or, at least, I did trust Mozilla completely.

I didn't know I ever had to read the fine print with anything from Mozilla, and it turns out I was wrong.

Which, I think is why so many people feel so strongly about it. At least, it's why I feel uncomfortable with this decision. It was not at all clear to me that Pocket was a third party service; I'd never heard of it, and the text describing what I was opting-in to didn't (that I recall) explicitly state who ran the service or that it was not a Mozilla service.

I don't want to go overboard about this; this isn't like SourceForge shipping malware. And, I don't want to make it seem like Mozilla isn't a provider and organization that I trust. But, this chips away at my trust. I feel misled, and I never thought I would feel that way about something Mozilla would do, which maybe makes it worse.

kozukumi• 11 years ago

I want to love Firefox like I used too but shit like this keeps putting me off. It is the little things that are annoying me now. Pocket integration without asking. Lack of a decent EN_GB dictionary (and I have to go and hunt for the damn thing myself).

It is just depressing the state of browsers today. Sure they are more standard compliant but they all suck.

CarloSanta42• 11 years ago

I don't like the latest trends at Mozilla at all. I used to use Firefox for privacy. It was small and fast and stable. I don't want to disable all the bloatware like share, sync, Mozilla account, tab ads, pocket, chats whatever. Mozilla is on a big sellout trip. When Mozilla is not different to Google we can equally use Chrome - it's better anyway.

junto• 11 years ago

Before you know it they'll be bundling in Java, ActiveX and Ask toolbar.

omouse• 11 years ago

Okay, develop a free/open source version. This is how it's been done in the past; you use a proprietary version of something until there's a free software version and then you work on the free software version until it's good enough.

Mozilla is in a heated competition with Google and other proprietary players. It isn't a niche product, it isn't made for a small part of the population. If adding Hello or Pocket to the browser gets more people to use Firefox or stick with it and spurs people to create free/open source replacements then it's alright.

The only thing I dislike is the underhanded way these changes have showed up. As if they knew the loud minority of users/devs wouldn't like it.

Mintwaxed• 11 years ago

No one needs Pocket. To save anything for later viewing, simply drag & drop the URL's icon to your desktop. When you are ready to read, click the icon.

Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

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