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> If the “Recommended by Pocket” feature is enabled, Pocket will send a list of the best stories on the web to Firefox every day. With each story, Pocket also sends a list of related websites that, when visited, signal likely interest in the story. Your Firefox browser compares your browsing history with the list of related websites to sort and filter through each day’s stories and recommend the ones that are most likely to interest you.
> Important Note: Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history. The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox.
The feature isn't "EU-excepted", it's "US-only", probably because they only have recommendations for US audiences.
Firefox is basically adware now.
Wiki >Adware, or advertising-supported software, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during the installation process
does pocket suggesting stories somehow generate revenue for Mozilla?
I think it's a disgrace.
And it was pushed as part of an unpaid marketing campaign for Mr. Robot. Which people thought was Mozilla cashing in big time by installing an extension they didn't want. It was done on a friendship basis. Mr. Robot has been pushing Firefox and so Mozilla wanted to give something back.
Which was a fun little easter egg that Mr. Robot fans could have activated. It would have flipped some words on webpages upside down as reference to Mr. Robot. Which, again, it didn't do, it did nothing unless you specifically went into about:config and activated it there (which is what Mr. Robot fans should have figured out themselves).
This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.
...in their browser that people are ok with them auto-updating, through which they can push even less restricted code than in an extension, and that completely invisible.
So, it was a fuck-up on Mozilla's part (in that the extension was visible in the extension list; if that wouldn't have been the case, it wouldn't have been a problem at all), but man was it blown out of proportion by journalists and know-it-alls, who just have to show that the innocent-thought Mozilla is evil.
You snark, but at the end of the day, they really shouldn't be installing stuff silently and without affirmative consent. The character of the stuff is irrelevant to this principle.
Comes under the heading of "not their job".
The basically idea is not to "fork" Firefox per se, but to maintain a set of patches that are appropriate for a user-respecting privacy friendly browser. If a true fork one day becomes necessary, this would be a nice starting point. For now, I'm just trying to completely remove all bad code.
You do have to build the source yourself, however, since binaries can't be distributed without violating Mozilla's trademark.
Well, it's trying to be. It's still millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of design decisions made by Google.
The same would be true for your wish of a Firefox-fork, though I'm not sure there's that much sense in it, since what Mozilla has been doing has not infringed on privacy. You'd be patching out things that are harmless.
I don't use Firefox so I'm not sure what it is showing, but if it is like the new tab in Chrome that pocket's extension generates, it is basically the top 3 in the recommended section of Pocket which seems to be popular articles of no particular importance or targeted. Earlier I saw links to an article for a Ryan Reynolds interview where he talks about his anxiety (apparently, didn't read it) and another article about all cultures appropriating (again, didn't read, so going on title). If it were targeted, I'd expect articles of a more technology/development slant.
Correction, 'you're not employing a "privacy-conscious approach" by EU standards'. The EU does not define for the world what privacy-conscious means.