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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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?)
>- 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"
>- 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?)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
[+] [-] MisterWebz|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pdkl95|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jtgeibel|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Puts|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gluxon|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] brador|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblohm7|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CarloSanta4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cmdrfred|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkaptur|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.planet-libre.org/?post_id=18514
[+] [-] azakai|10 years ago|reply
There is data showing that Firefox users like the feature and benefit from it. Given that, adding it to the browser makes sense.
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc2g4d|10 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] gluxon|10 years ago|reply
I do agree that the discussion should have been in the Mozilla Governance mailing list though.
[+] [-] chimeracoder|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] zanny|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] untitaker_|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abrowne|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] firasd|10 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] SwellJoe|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pc2g4d|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bharad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Someone may have to fork Firefox. It's still open source, more or less.
[+] [-] dblohm7|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glass-|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foobargarply|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omouse|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gcb0|10 years ago|reply
- 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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scott_karana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblohm7|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordocai|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblohm7|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobarrera|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kozukumi|10 years ago|reply
It is just depressing the state of browsers today. Sure they are more standard compliant but they all suck.
[+] [-] ChrisGranger|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imrehg|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] GeorgeHahn|10 years ago|reply
I love Pocket, but I was looking forward to migrating to a setup where my data was kept private.
[+] [-] maqr|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
Edit: ah, here we go https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126#c2
[+] [-] mordocai|10 years ago|reply