So it goes like this:
1. Firefox adds integration with a commercial, closed source service (Pocket)
2. People get up in arms about it
3. Mozilla issues some specially crafted statements about the relationship with Pocket (the decision to ship Pocket "has absolutely nothing to do with money"—it's only shipping because Firefox PMs like Pocket); so even if they are receiving kickbacks, this can arguably still be true, but it's widely understood to mean that there's no money changing hands
4. Mozilla's own employees who were taken in by the PR begin showing up in conversations thereafter and explicitly saying there's no money changing hands—because they don't know any more than what everyone else was told in #3
5. It's later revealed that there has, in fact, been a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket, contra claims otherwise
6. It's reported that Mozilla is finally just going to acquire Pocket, and it will become open source
7. Concerns are abated; people move on
8. There is no #8. The open source thing was never true. Pocket remains about as open source as it was before the acquisition.
I support Mozilla's mission, which is why I hate Pocket. It's not just obnoxious — it goes against everything Mozilla is supposed to stand for.
Maybe they really are independent, but there's no way to tell and Mozilla's past transparency failures (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653) haven't earned them the benefit of the doubt.
What does that have to do with independence and transparency?
It was a marketing stunt performed in partnership with a television show and was installed without the user's knowledge or consent.
> It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag.
It destroyed a lot of trust. Seriously. I too was really confused when I suddenly saw an extension I never installed. (This could happen before when desktop installers could add extensions but I don't think they can anymore so I was properly confused until K searched for it on the Internet.)
> It was not advertising. It was an easter egg.
Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
The thing is, Mozilla has always had the ability to put arbitrary things into firefox, and it's always had easter eggs in it. The way they did it was a big mistake but from my point of view only because it was scary-looking (and showed their extension pipeline had issues, I guess), not because of what it actually did.
> Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
How about this: It wasn't there to advertise to anyone that didn't already know about it.
- but it seems we mostly agree on this.
I still don't have any problems with easter eggs. Give me back my whimsy.
I mean: I too like whimsy, and adding an about:<something noncommercial> would probably be ok with me. (In fact I think there was an easter egg on some about:-protocol-page st some point.)
It was just the sudden surprise of seing an extension I didn't expect and then what at least felt like a hidden commercial motive on top of that.
Maybe it's the jarring worlds of security! paranoia! Absolute Control! vs. the FF wants to fun! unpredictable! Think different (no wait, that slogan's tainted now...)!
Given the way they present the extensions... it - in retrospect - should have been clear to them it would trigger more initial reactions from the first set of perspectives, and not just the second.
You calling this an easter egg had me confused as to what the hell this thread was about, searching for "firefox easter egg" shows nothing about it.
You could see the existence of the extension because of poor decisions.
But it didn't turn on unless you went into about:config and manually flipped "extensions.pug.lookingglass" to true.
Definitely intended as an easter egg. Even of the people getting upset about the visible extension, 99+% of them never saw the enabled effect.
The analogy applies to computing in 2 ways: they're hidden, and it's something desirable. Niether of those ways apply to what Mozilla did. Therefore it wasn't an easter egg and you trying to pretend otherwise is just confusing.
They made a mistake in deployment that turned it into a scary mysterious blob. That's bad, but doesn't change the underlying nature of the code.
We can agree that the exact same code in C, not showing up in any lists or menus, not triggering without a magic about:config phrase, would be a clear easter egg, right?
(Also easter eggs don't inherently have to be fun, sometimes they're just someone's initials.)
I hope the browser will still suggest feed-reading extensions when users land on feeds. Not doing that would be shady.
1) My employer has disabled the button in firefox. I can work around this by signing in in any browser but there is something weird that happens. I think I have to allow all kinds of google javascript spyware to run some kind of captcha to be able to sign in.
2) The saved links do not refer to the original sites I've saved. They are some kind of click-through tracking spyware.
Also the tagging feature seems hard to use. As I recall it seemed difficult to filter using multiple tags.
If it was more like Delicious I'd be happy with it.
Because Mozilla owns Pocket
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
I'm using feedbro now.
Live bookmarks never worked very well, now did it?
What percentage of people complaining about this are actually using the RSS support in FF itself at this moment?
all that said, I learned just now that firefox had RSS/ATOM support. Public open standard feeds should never die, but how was this in-browser feature ever useful?
People actually use Pocket.
You know a lot of people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature. Because you didn't say anything about he feature, but RSS in general. I use RSS. I didn't use the feature in Firefox.
Go to `about:config`, search for `extensions.pocket.enabled` and switch to `false`.
Not as good as uninstalling, but at least disabling is possible.
So in this case, the criticism comes down to: I don't like Pocket, and it's centralised. Which I don't think is very strong; the exact same point could be made about Firefox Sync: "they're pushing a bloated built-in centralised service that is very difficult to turn off entirely". Technically true, but really not a compelling argument to remove it or to make it easy to remove all mentions of Firefox Sync from the interface.
Pocket:RSS::allowance:salary.
I feel like we're entering a period when a browser shakeup is in order.
Chrome is spyware. Safari is usually an implementation laggard. Firefox makes a seemingly endless stream of stupid, annoying choices. (Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now.)
Seems like it is time, again, for something that sucks less.
Edge. It somehow manages to be worse than IE in many circumstances (including being used to view Microsoft's own websites).
I use pocket; it's better than nothing. Also: if it weren't for pocket, FF would have some difficulty competing with Googles suggestions, which are pretty OK, really, and definitely enough to keep me occasionally entertained - and without killer feature to beat chrome, why pick FF over chrome at all?
(Some context: I used to use chrome precisely for that reason, and recently switched back because the suggestion feature appears to work less well now, and FF's version is good enough).
(Completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox, the browser. Not Mozilla, the company.)