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Comment by callahad | Hacker News Reader

> There's been tons of people asking for the removal of Pocket from Firefox

That's true. However, we have surveyed large swaths of our users and found that for all the people that dislike the Pocket integration, several times as many actively do like it. They're not you or me, but barring a significant sampling error, it means the dissenters are a vocal but small minority. Of course, both classes are overshadowed by the proportion of users who don't care one way or another.

> "oh you can disable it by going to your about:config and finding this key and setting it to false"

That's false. From day one, you could disable Pocket entirely by right clicking on it and choosing "Remove from Toolbar" or by dragging it off the toolbar in the customization mode.

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baked in browser add-ons shouldn't be a popularity contest. I'm sure a facebook add-on would make tons of people happy as well. Yet you don't have that built-in.

I'm sorry, but this logic doesn't make much sense when you consider the fact that it's a third party service which may not be there next quarter or even next year. How about you just do the right thing and unbundle the extension? Make it an opt-in by default. Not an opt-out.

I'm confused by your argument that because the service's status may change, it shouldn't be bundled. Couldn't they update to remove Pocket if the service goes away? It's not like Firefox is going to stop development anytime soon.

Pocket is not Facebook. Pocket can go out of business sooner than Facebook will ever go out of business. Including Pocket can actually promote Pocket to get more users, so to some Fx users they suspect there was some money-business deal involved. After all Firefox doesn't bundle Yahoo being the default search in the North America region without Yahoo paying at least what Google was paying.

I'd like to add that there's another issue with bundling third party services like Pocket with a browser. You can't audit the internal security of the service. So, if another security vulnerability is found in Pocket you can't be sure if it's just the extension code (this you can audit easily) or the service itself (this not so much).

Instead of bundling it as baked in to Firefox why not just make it part of a "recommended extensions" section of the installer? Not only do you make the users that do use Pocket happy since it can be installed by default (just make us non-Pocket users uncheck the install extension(s) check box) but it gives users that don't want to use Pocket an option to not install it. And it gives developers a chance to vet extensions they feel may be good to add to Firefox to streamline the install experience such as suggesting password manager extensions like LastPass, Dashlane, or 1Password. Or any other highly useful extension (Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin).

It just seems to me the whole idea of making Firefox a convenient browser has become the kitchen sink approach to the problem rather than focusing on what is the essential web (supporting HTML, CSS, and JS standards). The rest is literally optional to use the web.

  > However, we have surveyed large swaths of our users and found that for all the people that dislike the Pocket integration, several times as many actively do like it.

Do you have any information to share publicly regarding that survey? Like the sample size, how it was done and things like that.

(Personally, I've disabled the Pocket Integration in about:config)

The specific numbers were shared during a keynote at Mozilla's June 2015 all-hands, but I can't seem to find a public recording or data from that session. My apologies.

Mozilla employees and vouched volunteers can view the recording at https://air.mozilla.org/gregg-lind/.

And as another long-time user of Firefox, I'm grateful that you keep adding useful things like Pocket. Any news on when the integration ships in non-US locales? That one had me stumped for a bit where I got Pocket on one box but not the other :)

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