Comment by arepublicadoceu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arepublicadoceu | Hacker News Reader

arepublicadoceu

I'm conflicted about this.

For me, the best implementation of private alias is the Apple one: %randomwords%[at]icloud.com. It's way harder to wildcard block [at]icloud.com, as there are legit users of the icloud domain, than a wildcard block for: [at]mozmail.com.

Unfortunately, using the apple implementation is just one more stone into their walled garden. I really wish firefox could create a legit free [at]firefox (or something else) mail and then create this alias service as premium bundle. It would be way harder for services to start blocking it.

Furthermore, I'm not really excited to the overall direction that Mozilla is moving with its side projects:

1. They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support.

2. They created an awesome private file sharing service (firefox send) and quickly butchered it.

3. They have a vpn that is simply mullvad with new clothes and fewer geographic availability. Why anyone would use it instead of mullvad is beyond me.

Mozilla needs some serious trust building before I trust it to manage several mail aliases for me.

> 2. They created an awesome private file sharing service (firefox send) and quickly butchered it.

Thankfully it was MPL licensed[0] and has an active fork[1]. The only problem is that Mozilla requested their trademarks Mozilla/Firefox be removed, so finding this fork is a bit hard on Google.

0: https://github.com/mozilla/send/blob/master/LICENSE

1: https://gitlab.com/timvisee/send

> They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support.

I've been waiting a long time to find someone who thought that Pocket was a good idea. Can you expand on what you like about it being integrated into firefox natively as opposed to an extension?

I've been a heavy user of Pocket, and I obviously think it's great. In the end it's not much more than a reading list, but what really makes it useful is its integration with the Kobo e-readers. I can happen upon an interesting long form article at work, save it to Pocket and read it on the subway on the way home on my phone, or before sleeping on the e-reader.

I'm not a Firefox user, so I'm using the extension, but if I were I'd really appreciate the integration.

Thanks for the reply. However, I was specifically hoping to hear a testimonial from a Firefox user who prefers it as a native integration rather than the extension.

> Can you expand on what you like about it being integrated into firefox natively as opposed to an extension?

Nowhere in my post I’ve said that I thought it was a good idea to integrate pocket to Firefox natively. I said that I loved pocket as a service. A service that improved constantly before Mozilla acquired it and now it seems like there’s no significant upgrade for the last however many years Mozilla acquired it.

As an addendum, I absolutely do not think that integrating pocket to Firefox was a good idea. Even though I love(d) pocket and Firefox, it should be an extension.

Agreed. They are all over the place and don't take good care of the only important thing, which is the browser. If I want a vpn, I will get a vpn. Same with email alias. This is yet another distraction. I'm not very optimistic.

I think they have a revenue issue. They can't make the money necessary to sustain a lot of their work so they are trying to find other sources of revenue that are privacy focused to help. See the layoffs from last year for example.

The problem is that half the commenters in any given thread about Mozilla say things like "they're too dependent on Google for revenue" and the other half say things like "they have too many side-projects, they should just focus on Firefox" and some select few complain about both simultaneously.

Pocket, VPN, and Relay are all revenue generating and probably don't require that much effort to run.

I actually think Mail, VPN and password manager are three things that Mozilla should have done since day 1.

The three have one thing in common that is privacy and trust. They are also all proven profitable and sustainable business. Which they should have used to market it and generate some safe income.

File sharing and content ads were all too risky moves.

Now that their product brand are damaged it is harder to built. Not to mention they now have a fewer user to capture those value.

> 1. They bought Pocket (which I loved) and now it's on life support.

Why do you say it's on life support?

No significant improvements in the last however many years. Yeap, it's a simple service but they constantly fail on the basics such as parsing the complete article.

Over the years I had several instances of widely popular sites not being completely parsed, missing paragraphs or images, to the point where I had to manually check every time I've saved something there. Whereas, on instapaper or safari reader mode, it parsed perfectly. I've submitted several fixes requests for such sites and they "promised they would look into it", nothing happened.

Yeap, I was a paying costumer and a heavy user for over three years, I finally gave up and closed my subscription.

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