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Comment by alyandon | Hacker News Reader

In a similar vein, I'd appreciate it if Mozilla would stop using updates to Firefox as a mechanism to re-enable misfeatures I've explicitly disabled like Pocket integration and the "recommend X feature|extension while you are browsing but don't forget we totally respect your privacy!" settings. :-/

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I've disabled Pocket via about:config and despite a year worth of updates, I honestly had never had the issue of it reenabling. And that is both on Windows with Auto-Update and Linux via package manager.

I run mostly FF dev & nightly and I've had it happen to me multiple times. I'm assuming the Pocket getting re-enabled problem is the result of an internal update to the extension that caused it to re-populate all the defaults in the config.

The other config settings I'm going to be less charitable about considering there would be no rational reason for an update to ever change those values.

I've never had the other settings change values either, I suspect you either ran into some bug or the sharing of a profile between dev&nightly is blowing this up.

Maybe - but definitely no sharing of profiles between dev & nightly and as you can see based on other comments in this thread I'm not the only one that has witnessed the behavior.

user.js files are awesome for Firefox. You just specify a list of preferences which then are applied every time you start Firefox.

(And here's a popular preconfigured user.js https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js )

Thank you! I'll definitely be using that going forward.

That sounds like a bug to me.

Maybe, but in some similar cases, it's marked as "won't fix": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1502188

If you configure Firefox to not automatically update, and then use, say, a package manager to update it, automatic updates will get re-enabled.

On the other hand, Firefox does respect locked preferences after update. Debian sets both app.update.enabled and toolkit.telemetry.enabled locked to false.

> If you configure Firefox to not automatically update, and then use, say, a package manager to update it, automatic updates will get re-enabled.

That isn't what the bug report says - package managers don't use the Firefox installer. Are you talking about a real bug (if so, is it logged?), or are you spreading FUD?

Depends on the package manager. On Windows both Ninite and Chocolatey use the Firefox installer and re-enable Firefox's automatic updates.

I have this problem too.

After a certain point, plausible deniability isn't plausible anymore.

They are doing it on purpose.

a "bug"

How much money does pocket actually generate? It blows my mind that mozilla would pull a java and have us install a figurative toolbar.

Mozilla acquired Pocket. Pocket is now part of Mozilla, providing content recommendation.

Yes that was a mistake. It did get the person who had the original lunch with Pocket off the hook though.

... and it cost $29m... and the thing still isn't open source...

Thanks, MoFoCo.

I may be mistaken about their revenue model, but I think it’s actually costing them money because they bought the company behind Pocket and they don’t seem to monetize the feature in any way.

Pocket Premium costs $45/yr for a subscription, so they're definitely monetizing it. (I'm a subscriber.)

https://getpocket.com/premium

My understanding is that they are using the Pocket organization as a way of managing the ads they now show by default on the new tab page. They call this "recommended by pocket". I don't know if it currently makes any money, but showing ads on every new tab opened in their browser certainly has the potential to.

pocket is such a useful tool that I have a hard time understanding this comment.

It's a tool I have perfectly good alternatives for I already use that keeps using screen and menu space in my browser. I.e. why does my context menu have a "save to pocket" option despite me not being signed up for it, that I only ever will click accidentally? I don't mind there being a Pocket integration in Firefox, I somewhat mind it getting in the way if I don't want to use it.

I eventually disabled Recommended by Pocket on my new tab screen because the recommendations were typically clickbaity and being on the new tab screen, it would many times divert me from whatever more important original action I meant to take.

The creators probably had good intentions, but Recommended by Pocket seems almost like a dark pattern.

I disabled that too but I still use pocket to manage my reading list. My new tab screen is completely blank, its oddly calming.

Since not all of the links are interesting, I'd like Recommended by Pocket to be able to learn from my input. I want to punish the uninteresting links and reward the interesting ones, so that I see more of something that I like.

mind sharing how you use pocket? i stopped using the web and mobile apps. all i get now is a weekly digest and that covers all i want.

For me its simple. I get most of my info on the web from RSS, and pocket is able to get through paywalls on articles with a right click.

I've never seen the described behaviour. Have you checked bugzilla.mozilla.org if this is a known problem?

I always create and use Firefox profiles with a custom user.js preference file. Here's a great one: https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js

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