What to Expect from Firefox in the Future

https://mail.mozilla.org//pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003062.html

by gluxon • 11 years ago

1 1 11 years ago

mail.mozilla.org

gluxon• 11 years ago

Every feature in the browser should be polished, functional, and a joy to use. Where we can’t get it to that state, we shouldn’t do it at all. In some cases that will mean spending time to make it great. In other cases that will mean removing code that we don’t see ourselves improving any time soon. In other cases it will mean finding third party services or addons that can do the job better than we can.

Pay close attention to this. This change in philosophy around features and incorporating third party services is going to create a Firefox that's radically different from releases in the past. For better or worse we've already started seeing these changes with the recent Pocket integration.

We’re not like most organizations, so we have to partner differently. We worked with Pocket to amend their Privacy Policy to be more in line with our principles. We made sure the code that shipped with Firefox was licensed appropriately.

Amending Pocket's Privacy Policy is something I was not aware of, and I think puts things in perspective. I have a little more faith in the Pocket decision now. It shows that the move was well thought out and Mozilla wasn't a Read It Later, Inc (Pocket's developer) pushover. Regarding the topic, Dave recognizes the community criticism later in the email.

But folks raised objections, and we need to address that. Some of the objections were about policy and strategy, and I’m not going to address those in this thread. But we did hear specific complaints about how the code was integrated. Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on that could have been more easily removed entirely from the browser. We tend to agree with that, and fixing that for Pocket and any future partner integrations is one concrete piece of engineering work we need to get done. Pocket was also given first billing on the main screen, and that may not be a scalable solution. We’re going to need to figure out how to best surface these things in our UI.

I admire this a lot. I just hope that future partnerships are announced well in advanced and the community has time to comment on implementation. I think integrating third party services will be an improvement, but only if executed well. Open-minded ideas like this certainly would have avoided problems like Microsoft's negligence of IE during the previous decade.

What to Expect from Firefox in the Future

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