Maybe FF team can answer why they keep pushing crap like Pocket down our throats.
The only time I am aware of Pocket is when someone online reports how this molehill is a mountain to them. I also wonder where they place their mouths while browsing that they experience it as being shoved down their throats.
Imagine how much time you spend on your chosen browser to configure it how you like it. How much extra work is it to set extensions.pocket.enabled to false in about:config if Pocket is causing so much pain?
It subjected me to a bunch of banal content on my homepage that I didn't want or like.
> Does it impose extra layers of clicking to get work done or occupy valuable screen space?
It occupied a second or two of my attention when opening a new tab. Sometimes I got suckered into clicking on an article, which I almost immediately regretted every time.
> this molehill is a mountain to them.
I clicked to disable it and moved on with my life. I find it unfortunate but not worth more than the two seconds of distraction it already took from me.
Three dot menu -> Remove Section. Ta-da.
If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it? How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed? These are the questions I ask when I use Firefox. Why are they spending time and resources on horrific products like Pocket when they could be literally improving their browser. Why is it pushed so aggressively and shamelessly?
Pocket is the perfect representation of all the grievances against Firefox rolled into an annoying in-your-face product and so of course it’s going to be the punching bag.
Why? I don't understand this. Mozilla needs to make money somehow. Unfortunately we don't live in a post scarcity world where programmers just contribute to OSS because they enjoy it and want to make the world better. Currently they do it because of those things AND because they need an income. Unfortunately things still cost money. (I think this answers your last few questions as well too)
> If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it?
I think this is sampling and internal bias. Have you seen the numbers of clicks? I haven't. But I rather like pocket.
If they have a product so polarising then maybe it shouldn’t be bundled as bloat to the browser.
I run Chromium, it probably spies on me, but it doesn’t do it in my face, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
When I run Firefox, they say they care, but they shamelessly bundle that crapware. Makes me wonder if another day after another Firefox update they’ll add Pocket 2.0 without me knowing.
It’s the same issue I have with Brave as well, I cannot stand the BAT integration.
Today's highlights: 1. What did Jesus wear? 2. What happens to your body when you walk 10,000 steps every single day 3. A 16-million-year-old tree tells a deep story of the passage of time
My first reactions: I mean, what did Jesus wear? 16 million years seems way too long...
I would never have looked up any of these things, and the odds of me stumbling upon them on Reddit, Facebook, etc. feels extremely low. The sort of stuff Pocket recommends just feels so different to the things other sites recommend to me. I've been a long-time fan of Pocket (even before it was added to FF), so there is some bias, but every time I open a new tab in FF and navigate to some site, there's that split-second of loading where I glimpse these titles, and very often I find myself clicking the back button to do a double-take. Pocket is good. I like it. To each his own.
It provides some revenue stream into Mozilla and it's a genuinely useful service.
> How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed?
There was a very detailed blog post about it recently. It boils down the architecture being a roadblock and being very open to operational abuse in terms of security and privacy of the users.
Sometimes, the most elegant and useful code gets the axe because, it genuinely blocks something further down the road. It's painful but, it sometimes needs to happen like this. Firefox is a very old code base. It's every part has been changed over time but, these changes were always gradual and connected to previous iterations so, the evolution kinda had a forced path out from some states.
> Why are they spending time and resources on horrific products like Pocket when they could be literally improving their browser. Why is it pushed so aggressively and shamelessly?
You might be thinking some service/product to be horrific but, I personally like to be able to read some stuff distraction free and being able store its permanent copies with my annotations on it very convenient from a knowledge base perspective. Looks like I'm not the only one so, the service's still alive.
Opera bundles some features more than a browser (VPN, et al.) with the browser, similarly people don't get rubbed by it.
Mozilla puts a button which is just a scriptlet to the UI and people got tipped off.
It just sits there and can be turned off [1]. I've never experienced any aggressive marketing for Pocket by Firefox (in app or out of band). I only get a weekly articles digest which, I subscribed and, that's all.
I wish we were living in an era where free and high quality software just survive without any revenue stream and web is not a mess of standards, bombardment of adverts and analytics frameworks and other sinister stuff but, that ship has unfortunately sailed and, I personally still angry about it.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-po...
FF itself provides a massive revenue stream.
Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
The deep integration of a 3rd party extension quite rightly did not sit well with many people.
However, since then, Mozilla has bought Pocket and there really is no reason to complain about Pocket integration anymore than complaining about Read It Later integration In Safari, or bookmarks.
There may be complaints about it from the perspective that I believe that Pocket is still closed source, which would be valid, but not Fromm browser users perspective.
Why isn't closed source a valid complaint from a user's perspective?
Pocket does not replace bookmarks, and if you try using Pocket for bookmarking, you're going to have a terrible experience.
As a disclaimer, I am a Pocket user.
Why would using Pocket for bookmarks be a terrible experience, out of curiosity? Pocket doesn't have folders but Firefox makes tagging bookmarks easier than using folders anyway.
This is particularly annoying for PDFs, because it can't extract titles from PDFs. If you bookmark something like [1], Pocket's title will be "ifl2014_submission_13.pdf" instead of "Church Encoding of Data Types Considered Harmful for Implementations".
Also, up until a month or two ago, the interface was anti-web, as searching did not have a URL you could use, so you couldn't set Pocket with a custom search keyword, for doing quick searches.
The biggest reason to use bookmarks is the AwesomeBar. For the example above, if I start typing "Church Encoding", Firefox will also search in my bookmarks. That search bar being multi-functional is awesome, because I don't have to remember to search my bookmarks. If searching in your bookmarks doesn't happen often, then it's just cold storage. Plus it's always nice when it saves you a Google round-trip.
There's also the issue that in Pocket I end up saving trashy articles that I don't necessarily want to archive. Although it's nice to remember a read article and find it again in Pocket.
Anyway, I wish Pocket would evolve into a Pinboard replacement, but unless it provides the capability of editing titles, and possibly descriptions too, then it can't be a replacement.
[1] https://ifl2014.github.io/submissions/ifl2014_submission_13....
"I don't like it and some people I know don't like it" is not evidence for something being unpopular in general.
> How come only popular things like advanced extension support gets axed?
https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
> I often hear people with savage opinions about Pocket. Can you state what hardship this has caused you? Did it violate your privacy? Does it impose extra layers of clicking to get work done or occupy valuable screen space? Is it helping to fund child slave labor?
It does in fact impose extra clicks and occupy screen space. People are in fact allowed to care about ethical issues short of child slave labor.
> when someone online reports how this molehill is a mountain to them
I'm so sorry; I didn't realize that your priorities were the universal standard.
> I also wonder where they place their mouths while browsing that they experience it as being shoved down their throats.
And I wonder whether you're incapable of understanding a metaphor or simply revel in dismissing legitimate concerns.