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Comment by jp_rider | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to disable pocket, here are instructions:

https://help.getpocket.com/article/1025-disabling-pocket-in-...

Unfortunately that doesn't disable the "Recommended by Pocket" crap on the New Tab Window. I have Firefox installed on 8 different machines and the option to remove "Recommended by Pocket" in the New Tab Preferences only appears in half of them.

If you're missing the option then you can open about:config and set "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories" to false to get rid of it. I also blew away the "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories.options" key that contains all of the configuration crap for pocket.

Unfortunately non of this is or the op's settings are synced in your Profile so you have to change it on all of your machines. :(

If you like syncing files you could look into user.js for syncing config settings:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file

Am I missing something? I don't see how that ties into Firefox Sync to propagate changes to all instances.

* Also, that's very cool regardless.

Not really, just that you need to be crazy enough to write and sync a file instead with e.g. Resilio or Dropbox.

Well I appreciate the link. That's certainly easier than editing properties in about:config.

Huh, going through the prefs there it looks like they probably have telemetry going on in the new tab page. Where all your history goes.

I miss the Mozilla that actually acted like they cared about privacy.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, can you clarify?

Sure; I'm just complaining about the _existence_ of `browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry`. I'm not comfortable having tracking so near user data.

Now that I'm not on a mobile and can actually look at the code, it looks like it's defined at [1]. I must be reading TelemetryFeed.jsm wrong, though, because that says addSession() holds on to the URL (as .page) and createPing() puts it into the ping...

[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-release/file/FIREFOX...

Tracing back through the code, this is only triggered with a URL by the RemotePages watcher, which notifies when the URL matches one of a whitelist. The only whitelisted URLs currently are about:home, about:newtab, and about:tabcrashed.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/modules...

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=symbol:%23Rem...

Just click on the gear on the "New tab" page, you can disable recommended by pocket.

> Just click on the gear

> I have Firefox installed on 8 different machines and the option to remove "Recommended by Pocket" in the New Tab Preferences only appears in half of them.

The gear you're referring to opens the "New Tab Preferences" screen that I was referring to.

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