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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I understand you don't like the negativity.

So tell me now, how did this happen? "Sponsored tiles", nobody batted an eye?

Will you try telling me the devs themselves did not see this as a potential source of problem? (I know for a fact that's not the case)

OK, let's assume this is a simple mistake. Now what happened with Pocket? We all know devs want to make it into an extension (and are working on it)... so why was Pocket pushed so hard and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions before being released in a way that would obviously create drama?

If you step back and think about these issues you'll see they're systemic. God damn right I'm concerned about Mozilla, a company I respect a lot, becoming a shell of what it claims it stands for.

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> so why was Pocket pushed so hard

Was it?

All I saw was it being integrated into Firefox, and there being a lot of backlash. Against that backlash, there were a couple of people pushing hard to justify it, but they were either independent or Mozilla employees (often from a different team) posting independent opinions. I don't think Mozilla pushed Pocket a lot. Pushing features through the release cycle is pretty common.

Bear in mind that Mozilla integrated Pocket because it was the kind of feature it wanted to have in Sync (or Accounts, whatever it's called), but decided to use a third party service instead of making their own. From that POV it's much more reasonable. Not denying that it could have been done better with a pluggable open API and an open source equivalent (or whatever), but it's not that bad from that lens.

Sponsored tiles was an experiment, IIRC. Mozilla wanted to see if non-annoying, easy-to-disable ads could be used to fill otherwise blank space. It seems to have failed. But I would guess that a lot of the devs were hopeful about this experiment. I (not a Mozilla employee, but I do contribute a lot) was, at least.

"Pushed hard", since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user. This is a significant business decision which can change people's perception towards Mozilla. It definitely did for me. It IS a big deal that a popular browser supports some obscure 3rd party service as primary bookmarking service when there are many other 3rd party bookmarking services in the market such as Instapaper.

> since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user

...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works.

> obscure 3rd party service

Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox?

> since the feature made it all the way to production versions which rolled out to every firefox user ...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works. ==> Do we really need to define what "pushing" means? I'm sure you know what I mean by pushing, you're just doing wordplay. That's not how it works.

> obscure 3rd party service Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox? ==> What do you think the ratio of (# of pocket extension users / # of total firefox users) is? It's totally fine if FF had supported it as a pure "extension" (doesn't come preinstalled but required users to search and "pull" themselves if they wanted) but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.

> I'm sure you know what I mean by pushing, you're just doing wordplay. That's not how it works.

No, I don't. They did with Pocket what they do with every nontrivial feature. Implemented it, and sherriffed it through the release trains. I don't think it was immediately plopped on a Firefox release, I recall seeing it on Developer/Aurora much earlier, which means it went through the release trains like everything else. The OP said, quote, "so why was Pocket pushed _so hard_ and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions". How was it "pushed" "hard" if they did the _same thing_ they do for other features?

Yes, they made the decision to implement this feature. That doesn't count as pushing. I already illustrated why that decision made sense at the time.

Perhaps there was some backlash as it was on Aurora/Beta, I don't recall the exact timelines. IMO it's still okay to let the feature -- one which you still think makes sense and would benefit the userbase -- continue to ride the trains and hit a release while you try to understand the criticism and come up with a solution. It may be a better solution to disable it until a decision is made, but that depends on the perceived severity of the problem. Again, I don't see any hard pushing here, just a somewhat justifiable choice. I too would have preferred if they removed the feature when there was backlash, but I don't see anything wrong with the other solution. If you immediately backtracked every time there was criticism nothing would get done.

> but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.

Sure. But you gave the example of Instapaper (which you seem to be more okay with Firefox integrating with); I'm suggesting it was probably less popular than Pocket in FF or at least comparable popularity. I'm not disagreeing that integrating with a closed third party service is not good. I'm just pointing out a flaw in your Instapaper comment.

I realize this conversation is going nowhere since you decide to interpret things in ways that fit your argument just to fight, which is why I said you're just word-playing. I will go ahead and answer but you will probably disagree anyway: I didn't say I'm ok with them implementing Instapaper, and I definitely never said Instapaper is more popular. Go back and read again. I just pointed out how picking a single 3rd party service--NOT developed by Mozilla--and promoting it to the entire user base when there's a whole industry of read-it-later service ecosystem out there is a "non-trivial" issue, just like you even wrote. Therefore it would have been the same if they implemented Instapaper only, just like they did with Pocket only. And like you admitted, it is a "non trivial" feature, and in my book, when a feature is shipped and it's non-trivial, it was "pushed hard". This is again where you decide to disagree based on your own definition of "pushed hard". Your interpretation of "push" is intentionally narrow to only fit your interest. The original commenter and I simply pointed out how a non trivial feature like this was "promoted" (pushed) to users in an unusual way. Any decision to highlight a 3rd party product inside your main product (such as Firefox featuring Yahoo or Google as main home page) is a big deal, and just like how I would consider FF implementing Yahoo as homepage "pushing hard", I consider Pocket bookmarklet incident "pushing hard". You probably know what I'm trying to say but are just arguing based on semantics of these words.

I'm not wordplaying; we just disagree on what kind of "pushing" is acceptable for Mozilla to do :)

I feel that making the decision to make a feature (when there are good reasons behind it) is okay for Mozilla to do. Nothing wrong or malicious there. You evidently don't: we'll have to agree to disagree there. :)

I wasn't twisting definitions to fit my argument, I didn't feel there was anything wrong with deciding to implement something (when there are good reasons to) so I assumed you and the OP were troubled about something else.

Sorry about the pointless argument!

From what I remember, Pocket was "fast tracked" to the Firefox 38 Beta channel just a couple weeks before release. It did not ride the trains from Nightly to Aurora to Beta. This was controversial within Mozilla. We have the pre-release channels for good reasons.

The Pocket tracking bug was filed in April 2015 [1] but the feature shipped with Firefox 38.0.5 in June 2015, just two months later.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=pocket#c0

Wasn't it fast tracked into the release channel? That is, 38.0.5 would have been a patch release on top of 38.0.4.

On the bright side, that has lead to a more serious look at shipping parts of the browser as first-party extensions. I'm very much looking forward to that, even if I end up leaving all of them on.

I see what you mean. 38.0.5 was a special marketing release to promote Pocket and new Hello features. You can see on Mozilla ftp server that the version numbers of the 38.0 patch releases jump from 38.0.1 to 38.0.5 (leaving room for any emergency patch releases of 38.0.1):

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

38.0 was released on 2015-05-12. 38.0.5 then sat in the Beta channel for two weeks of testing and then it was released on 2015-06-02:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Past_branch_d...

TIL. Thanks for the info :)

I think I've seen this done for other features in the past, but yeah, this doesn't sit well with me.

(Still mostly okay with it though)

That's not true at all. Bookmarks are as far as I can tell separate from Pocket. Pocket is a read later extension.

What's not true at all? When you say something is not true at all, you need to specify what exactly you are referring to. I mentioned several points in my comment. "Extension" is something that you extend your browser with and doesn't come pre-installed.

I guarantee you most Firefox users either use Pocket, or don't care that it's a default feature in the product now.

I am in the boat that wishes it was removable, perhaps as some kind of "default add-on", but it's not. I'm not removing FF because of it.

And as for ads: Were they tracking people with them? Were they sending back GUIDs of my browser every time I loaded a new tab? This is a legit question that would affect my opinion on the matter. The ads I see are brief, and cannot take more than a miniscule amount of data to serve. By those metrics, I have no problem with them.

I didn't remove FF because of it either, but these things pile up slowly--makes me think WTF were they thinking?--and if I see several more of these I will probably stop using it. As I mentioned in another thread somewhere, I agree a lot of people don't care or not aware, but if asked directly "would you rather have this Pocket extension come pre-installed or not?" I am sure majority of them would say they don't want it. Just because people don't complain doesn't mean they're fine with it. People live with shitty customer service from comcast but that doesn't mean they have good customer service.

They took away the status bar because it was superfluous (really they were just copying chrome) and then they integrate a third party extension into the browser.

It sure seems to me it was pushed hard.

Why would you expect MoCo not to act like a corporation? They do care for their users a lot, but they consider that they would not help them a lot if they did not exist.

Given the deep pockets that have risen to develop the Web to new lengths, Mozilla has needed more money and more developers. They are lacking in the chrome (the UI), in tooling, in platform presence (the iOS version came very late!), and little by little, in Web features. Not to mention musts like tab separation into processes, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.

(Edit: removed parallelism.)

Imagine you saw that issue, and need increased revenues. You don't want to impact existing users, as you know they would be mad. What do new users see that old users don't? Those empty tiles in about:newtab. Those tiles are useless anyway, and from a UX perspective, new users don't understand what they stand for. Having a few example websites would be a good indication. It fits marvellously in the constraints they had.

How about Pocket? As we discussed, their chrome is getting old. In particular, the bookmarks feature is both old, has a lot of old bugs that don't get fixed, and they have wanted to do an overhaul for a long time (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697359). But they lack development effort.

If only there was a company that did bookmarks better than we did, we wouldn't have to do the work! Oh, there is: Pocket.

One last thing that they can do to increase revenue is to make competition among search engines be felt. So they switched to Yahoo!. However, Yahoo!'s perspective was to show the world that Yahoo! Search had grown to be much better. Unfortunately, it is still behind as a product in terms of UI cluttering, quality of results, range of inputs... They still don't have a cartographic service! Let alone a worldwide routing engine and a GTFS crawler... So they may disappear.

It has become phenomenally hard to compete against Google. Their best shot at relevance is Servo now, but given the huge amount of work that is, they will still need deeper pockets.

> parallelism, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.

No browser engine is particularly parallel. Gecko is not really more or less parallel than any other engine.

Sorry. It was part of a point I wanted to make about how hard it would be to make Firefox have the features that Servo will offer, like tiled rendering or parallel layout, which is a step further from merely getting to parity with Chrome and Safari architecture-wise.

As a long time Firefox user and enthusiast neither sponsored tiles nor the phone thingy annoyed me to much, especially the tiles thingy could actually have reduced the dependency on Google if it had worked.

Now we know they got another search deal but that wasn't always a given.

One logical explanation why it wasn't made an extension is if somebody was planning on neutering the extensions already back then. :-/

Exactly. This would have been on a roadmap somewhere.

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