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Comment by aceshades | Hacker News Reader

What was the misstep with Pocket? I've been loving it since I discovered it thru Firefox.

Pocket used to be 3rd party for a moment, later Mozilla integrated it in Firefox and enabled integration for everyone by default. Some people didn't like it, but others love it. Pocket now belongs to Mozilla and is covered with the same privacy policy as other products and services from Mozilla (GDPR compliant before GDPR was a thing). There are plans to open-source Pocket the same way Firefox-sync is open-source and can be self-hosted. Some people just still think that browser is a stand-alone app that works without 3rd party code or integrations, they just never inspected network traffic of Firefox or any other browser.

It's just some people don't like it's bundled in by default. Seems really as a non-issue, especially since now Mozilla owns the service.

It's still an issue because you can't uninstall it, it's hard to disable completely (and on Mobile the option is buried in various menus and hard to find), and they're removing RSS/Atom feed support which would be fine if it was just to split more things out into addons like they claim, but then they're encouraging that you use Pocket instead. Mozilla encouraging the use of their own proprietary service over an open standard is unacceptable and against their mission, and yet I still have to have Pocket pop up and show me ads every time I reinstall my browser until I can figure out how to stop it from downloading random stories about things.

Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature based on Firefox Sync when they suddenly replaced it with Pocket. At the time, Pocket was a third party with a business model that included data mining. Mozilla owns Pocket now, but it still requires users to give up some of their privacy.

Mozilla employees denied for months that Pocket paid for the integration. Eventually it came out that there was a referral deal.

Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.

That's cool. And? I use a lot of addons. Should they all be bundled because many people happen to love them too?

To be fair, Mozilla now owns Pocket. It's not just some random extension. Chrome comes preinstalled with YouTube, Gmail etc. too. It's a bit of cross-property promotion and to be fair, Pocket is indeed quite useful.

> To be fair, Mozilla now owns Pocket. It's not just some random extension.

My understanding is that at the time it was foist in users it was very much just some random extension, tho

They did not own it from the start, but they did have a special privacy agreement with Pocket regarding user data. Also, the acquisition was a result of user feedback, something Google would likely ignore.

If you own a Kobo, it is even more useful.

In fact, I switched to Firefox because of the pocket integration, not the other way around.

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