Hacker News Reader

Comment by franklyt | Hacker News Reader

My complaint about FF is the inclusion of pocket, a closed-source default with a political bias doesn’t seem appropriate for an open source privacy-focused browser.

View on HN

Both of your comments in this thread confuse me. “Don’t use these tools which greatly increase your privacy and security because of some minor potential flaw.” To me it sounds like you don’t want to get in to the lifeboat because you might get a sliver climbing in. And you encourage others to stay out as well. Odd.

I didn’t say what you’re saying I said. Making inferences based on my posts and presenting those inferences as unequivocal statements I’ve made is... well, not helpful. I think alternate perspectives and legitimate concerns about all technologies should be discussed without devolving into accusations that I’m against the platform.

I agree with Mozilla's views politically, but Pocket is proprietary. It's a major flaw. Something proprietary (I know the Firefox integration is free now, but the server isn't), controlled by an American corporation, turned on by default, that sends content to the user. If it was only an RSS reader, fine. But it sends arbitrary content to the user from Pocket's servers! What if there's an RCE? Their refusal to free Pocket despite it being years since the acquisition points to something sinister, like a NSL.

What is a NSL? I looked it up and didn't find anything relevant.

National Security Letter; if the government wants to force you to backdoor some software, they send you one. That's why most projects have canaries.

Generally on F-Droid if an app talks to a non-free server component, the app is labeled "this app promotes non-free network resources", but the majority of Free Software-loving nerds install that app anyway. After all, it still beats using stuff like the Google Play Store. So why is Firefox doing the same thing so heinous that people would completely refuse to use it, and use one of the proprietary browsers instead?

There are other non-proprietary browsers, and Firefox is not innately better than any of them. Icecat for example. Or Epiphany. I really, really dislike Brave, and despise the person responsible for it, but even it's freer than Firefox in this regard.

Icecat (like Fennec F-Droid, too) is simply a rebranding of Firefox, and so dependent on Firefox’s ongoing development. My concern is that if people keep attacking Firefox so vehemently, that will weaken its long-term survival, and there will be less chance of the Firefox forks, too, surviving.

I know IceCat is a rebranding of Firefox. It doesn't include the Pocket integration, and therefore is an upgrade.

If Firefox dies, it honestly wouldn't be a massive loss for the open web at this point. Webkit and Blink are sufficiently divergent that we would more or less be in the same position we were when Firefox was introduced.

Mozilla's been giving their executives raises while laying off the people who actually make the thing for years now, anyway. It above everything else has sabotaged its ability for long-term survival; no amount of internet rage will change the fact that Mozilla itself does not want Firefox to survive. And its forks would likely survive; Pale Moon has somehow been able to keep at roughly feature parity for ages now despite having forked off a long time ago.

This is a valid concern, it's kind of icky to open Firefox and see them pushing some company Pocket's services.

Inspired to research further, I looked and found that Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017, and it supposedly works on your local-only data for recommendations. Pocket has a subscription plan, and Mozilla as a free software co doesn't have many revenue streams. Them needing to present their product to users doesn't seem that bad viewed in the context of needing a way to support the product. I do think it could be better presented ie explained clearly what pocket is and why they show it to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com