> If it is so unpopular, how come Firefox hasn’t axed it? Because I don't think it's quite unpopular. I'm a Pocket subscriber and use it very heavily, even before it joined Mozilla and got integrated into FF).

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.