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Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

They have to make money somehow. They're not making it by selling all of your data (and giving it to the NSA for free) like Microsoft and Google.

How do you suggest they continue to exist, if not partnering with Pocket / Yahoo / etc?

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Mozilla did not receive any monetary compensation for integrating Pocket.

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/38aorv/psa_mozilla...

If true, that makes it even stupider. If they're adding even more unnecessary bloat to the browser they should at least be compensated for it.

In fairness, what amounts to a hyperlink is not "bloat". I wish it wasn't there because it's a thing nobody is ever going to use in the age of Hangouts and Skype, but it's not like impacts the rest of the browser in any way

It very, very negatively impacted mozilla's and firefox's PR.

Case in point: This entire thread.

It only takes a tiny number of people to make a lot of noise, but I don't think it represents public opinion. Consider the Tea Party: Whether you agree with them or not (please don't answer), based on the noise they generate they might seem to be a majority, but they are a small and shrinking minority.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. There may be a relatively small number of very vocal individuals, but I think their opinions may be much more widely held that you believe they are. It's no secret that Firefox's share of the market has been dropping lately. For every individual who speaks out against the latest set of bad decisions from Mozilla, there are clearly many other users who share that disappointment, but say nothing, and instead just move from Firefox to some other browser. It's these silent former users who contribute to Firefox's decline in market share each month.

I'm (loosely) affiliated with Mozilla and I can guarantee you everything I heard from inside is about poor reception.

Hell, I use one-tab on Chrome, but pocket is just a usability disaster. If I can barely bring myself to use it, imagine the rest :/

Even if its not a performance or code bloat, its a UI bloat. An unnecessary button that very few people will ever use.

Maybe, but all the people who had aneurysms about it would have been even louder.

How does the linux kernel continue to exist? How does busybox continue to exist? How does FreeBSD continue to exist?

Hint: none of them have signed bundling deals.

Those are all essentially infrastructure projects that (one way or another) add value to end user products that (not always, but quite often) are monetised somehow and in turn contribute or donate back, because they can. Firefox OTOH is an end user product itself, quite a different case.

Note that I'm no fan of the Pocket integration at all - to my knowledge there isn't even any sort of bundling deal or other kind of monetisation involved. I don't understand why Mozilla does this.

I don't agree with you. Firefox is an infrastructure product; it's how end users interact with actual products they care about (e.g., Facebook, Netflix, etc). Few people fire up a web browser without the intention of consuming third-party (non-Mozilla) content, just like few people boot a linux system just to watch the kernel run.

As a matter of fact, we have empirical data posted just yesterday about who is committing to the mainstream browser engines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10503653

You are welcome to draw your own conclusions about the viability of constructing a modern browser engine on donated time from a handful of Facebook and Netflix engineers.

OTOH, there's the counter argument that if search engines and OS vendors are willing to pay for browsers, why should Facebook and/or Netflix spend any money? It seems to be the classic business case problem of, "well everyone else is paying for it already, and as a result we won't have much affect".

I do, of course, realise that FB and Netflix very much have an interest in the web platform, and could undoubtedly influence it more if they were willing to contribute code. That said, it's probably worthwhile to point out to those who don't know that both FB and Netflix are W3C members, and have several people who contribute heavily to specs.

With very few exceptions, open source projects (particularly infrastructure projects that add value to end-user projects) are not getting financial contributions from the companies that monetize them.

Just look at GnuPG, OpenSSH, or OpenBSD. These are projects that produce some really essential infrastructure that runs the modern web. This software has been in use at companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, etc for decades. They have received almost no support whatsover. Werner Koch (of GPG fame) was so broke and desperate that he considered getting a corporate job. Theo de Raadt tried to get support from any of the hardware vendors that used OpenSSH in their products. He eventually got a laptop from IBM after pestering them for a year. I doubt busybox or mksh get much in the way of support from Google or Android hardware manufacturers.

I would hazard a guess that Firefox is better-funded than most open source "infrastructure" products.

According to Mozilla, the Pocket button doesn't make money.

So Telefonica is just doing this because they're really nice guys and aren't trying to increase the visibility of their products? And the Mozilla Foundation took on the extra code debt only because they were 100% convinced users wanted these extensions and not because they received a sizable donation from their partner to have it installed and on the toolbar by default with no way to completely remove it unlike every other extension.

Telefonica has nothing to do with the Pocket extension, they just (as far as I know) run the rendezvous servers that support the Hello feature.

Mozilla wanted to ship a WebRTC implementation, but it's not much use having webcam and microphone input unless you can send them to other people, and in this age of NAT and firewalls, that needs a rendezvous server. Mozilla had already had fruitful business interactions with Telefonica with FirefoxOS, and a telco seems like a reasonable choice for hosting a long-uptime network service...

In exchange for donating server hosting, Telefonica gets to display their logo in the Hello UI. I don't know if they also shelled out money in addition to hosting a service, but 80% of Hello's code is Firefox platform stuff (VP8 encoding and decoding, etc.) not Telefonica stuff.

Pocket (Read It Later, Inc.) has nothing to do with Telefonica.

Obviously this doesn't happen, but they -should- exist solely on donations from both personal and corporate sources that are no-strings-attached.

Unfortunately, in the real world they end up doing things like pocket in order to survive.

The huge problem with today's generation; they want everything and they want it now and they want it free. How dare they make money somehow because the same person complaining about the pocket and hello integration would also not pay anything for the browser.

How do you possibly imagine a non-free browser competing with all the free browsers out there?

We live in an era where entire operating systems are free for end users. Not everything needs to be fucking monetized.

They could at least have included Pocket and Hello as normal addons.

Parsing and loading an add-on would increase startup time. If you haven't put in your Pocket credentials, it's a single "if" statement that has to be evaluated. Having Pocket installed is the common case and the one that should be optimized for.

Are you worried that data will go to Pocket even if you don't log in?

> Having Pocket installed is the common case and the one that should be optimized for.

This statement is utterly wrong. Pocket has 14,000,000 users. Firefox has between 125,000,000 and 150,000,000 users. Assuming every single Pocket user is also a Firefox user, you're now optimizing for 10% of your users. This is clearly stupid.

It's also incorrect to claim that parsing and loading an addon would increase startup time. It's already loading the Pocket button; moving that code into an addon would not affect startup time at all. What it would do is allow users to disable or remove the Pocket integration -- which of course Pocket is paying Mozilla to prevent.

Don't pretend this is a technical decision. It is a business transaction.

The average add-on adds 10% to Firefox's startup time. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2011/04/01/improving-add-on-... If this were an especially efficient one it might not be that bad, but it does take a performance hit.

Not when uninstalled/disabled.

No, I just want 0 code of it on my system. Even if it’s never executed.

You can strip it from the code, its not too hard. The issue is with the release cycle, an having to modify the code each time. I wish they would just make a build without the crapware bundled.

edit: to -> too

FWIW, the code is still developed by Mozilla and open source; it just calls Pocket APIs.

And I’d have to write a patchset and maintain it to get rid of it.

It’s as if my browser had a copy of Wolfenstein3D integrated.

Funny easteregg, but just a waste of development and testing time, and a waste of storage space.

Every line of code costs time and money in testing.

And here it costs me time every few days to fix new issues that were introduced when the code changed, to update my .patch, reapply it, recompile, repackage. Every few days. All the time.

And when the regression with Gtk3.14 -> 3.18 regarding Drag-and-Drop is still not fixed, but they have time and money to implement, test and bugfix this, sorry, but then I am seriously out of options for running a stable, customizable no-bullshit browser.

What's the bug number for drag-and-drop problem?

1218200 is a duplicate, 1212733 is the one big original bug number.

Currently it’s fixable by downgrading Gtk, but at the moment there is no fix in Nightly either yet.

It's a bug in e10s mode, which is still a beta feature that you need to enable! If you want a stable browser, WTH are you enabling opt-in, explicitly unstable features?

Okay, then which version of Firefox supports a single tab crashing without the whole browser crashing with me not having to enable e10s?

Because I have enough of Firefox Stable with just recommended settings completely hanging up or crashing every time it encounters flash or similar things.

Flash already runs in a different process, even without e10s enabled.

Dunno why your Firefox is crashing every time it encounters Flash or similar media, but I can assure you that's not a common experience. Maybe try enabling click-to-play?

I filed a bug report for that, too, and it discovered multiple gaping holes in the sandbox, which, luckily, only allowed null pointer dereferencing (so no RCE problems, but still DoS)

> sorry, but then I am seriously out of options.

Wow this is some level of entitlement I have rarely seen before.

You have the option to contribute. You're not the only one who doesn't want pocket.

I can easily submit a patch to remove pocket and place about:reader more prominently.

Is it going to get accepted into Firefox? No. Just like the last 5 times people tried to do this.

What I currently do is constantly keeping my patch up to date and recompiling Firefox for my Desktop and Laptop (ARCH and Kubuntu) every night based on the current source from the latest trunk release.

But it’s not nearly worth the effort to do this when the browser could easily accept one of the many patches people have written by now to get rid of pocket as part of the system and to move it into an addon.

Same with the ad-ridden new tab page. Put that stuff into an addon and allow me to uninstall it.

Expose the EME DRM feature as plugin on the plugins page, and allow me to uninstall it (I do not know if this is yet the case, I haven’t checked).

I don’t want to have to maintain a huge patchset just to run my browser.

I already have to hack-fix bugs like the before mentioned drag-and-drop bug myself (or downgrade to Gtk3.14).

You have a valid point, but you'll be glad to know that they are backing the code out into an add-on. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

That's a fairly high level of outrage, why?

How is "not installing unused software" considered to be "outrage"?

It's a minor browser feature. Most people will never use e.g. the mozilla developer tools.

I find it hard to believe that someone with significant karma on HN doesn't understand surveillance-as-a-business-model. Just being a yet another Service As A Software Substitute[1] is bad enough, but in this case these rent-seekers are exploiting user ignorance (it's a "dark pattern"). Firefox has always been a local app, with remote features requiring the user to opt-in to an extension. The distinction between Mozilla "only providing a button" and the actual feature that loads from the remote SaaSS only exists for people that understand these technologies.

Mozilla is being especially hypocritical with the integration of these features. During their previous projects (e.g. Australis) Mozilla pushed a lot of previously-integrated features into extensions. This caused problems for a LOT of people, but I reluctantly supported it because a minimal core with most features as plugins is generally a good design. For them to turn around an integrate a plugin that baits people into using spyware is outrageous - and somewhat suspicious.

That button needs to be removed because it's an attractive nuisance[2].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine

>This caused problems for a LOT of people, but I reluctantly supported it because a minimal core with most features as plugins is generally a good design. For them to turn around an integrate a plugin that baits people into using spyware is outrageous - and somewhat suspicious.

Bah. It's basically a lightweight extension, and will soon get packaged as one. It's not integrated into the core, which means the main anti-bloat principles are still upheld.

And it's not like it hides the process of making an account. If you want to sync things, you need a server. Not suspicious.

> If you want to sync things, you need a server.

So why not use about:reader and Firefox Sync?

If pocket is "spyware", I'm not sure Firefox Sync is going to be considered all that much better.

Sync was useful in it's original form that was encrypted entirely client-side. With the recent(-ish) changes, Sync should be considered spyware (or at least having the potential to be hijacked into spyware).

But does making this stuff uninstallable and difficult to disable really make them that much additional money? Seems like a poorly negotiated deal if that was really part of it.

Pocket is disabled by default (the code is only loaded when you click the button), and you can hide the button with right click → hide from toolbar.

That's like saying that bookmarks are disabled by default because the bookmark code does nothing until you interact with the browser, eg click the star or type in the "awesomebar".

If it's in the default UI it's not disabled, disabled means you have to take steps outside the expected workflow to enable it.

Dramatisation follows ...

"Oh, this rock I put in the middle of the floor, don't worry it's disabled; if you don't kick it or fall on it then it can't hurt you. Sure, putting it there makes you likely to trip on it; requires you to move it if you don't want to.

What's that? The company name on the side, oh that's just the company that asked us to put the rock here. Yeah, we're totally honouring our roots and keeping with minimalism aren't we!

No, no, it's not an advert - many of our users like having this rock here.

Next week we're going to scatter marbles on the floor, each one says 'drink more Koke', aren't we just being awesome.

Ha, do you remember when you had to choose for yourself which junk to clutter your office up with."

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