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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

I think what I don't get is why this is so important that it has to be bundled in the browser. I have always viewed Firefox as being fiercely, at times absurdly, about the idea of providing a minimal browser on top of which users can use extensions to build whatever customised experience they want. Sure, integrating Pocket allows Mozilla to (in the quote linked by meesterdude (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876221 )) "provide this feature to our users in the best way possible", but the same argument could be made for tons of extensions; I think that they haven't made the case that this one is so important that it needs to be integrated. (Is the extension functionality, which can provide amazing services like Greasemonkey, really so limited that Pocket and Mozilla couldn't work together to write an extension that provides an indistinguishable experience?)

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> I think what I don't get is why this is so important that it has to be bundled in the browser.

They've made a statement just last week following a developer summit. Sounds like Pocket et al might yet be repackaged as default addons afterall.

    Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on that could
    have been more easily removed entirely from the browser. We tend to
    agree with that, and fixing that for Pocket and any future partner
    integrations is one concrete piece of engineering work we need to
    get done.

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003...

because:

1/ its a source of revenue and get VP's bonuses for diversifying mozilla's revenues

2/ its a test to see how people like if mozilla starts incorporating 3rd party cloud services in the user-agent

(doesnt actually sound evil put like that does it?)

result:

1/ some few people get paid a few hundred thousand/year

2/ mozilla alienates people, loses market share

3/ said vps will leave when mozilla can't pay them bonuses no more

(I think that's sadly close to the truth)

i dont know about you, but that sounds pretty damn evil to me.

It's also wild speculation, so should be taken accordingly.

Note that zobzu didn't provide any sources for his/her blind speculation, so don't jump to "Mozilla is evil" based on their comment.

just ask anyone that left mozilla recently. of course, since you sign nda's (yes, even at mozilla) i doubt many will come out publicly.

I don't like the change but it's not like revenue is evil.

Putting focus on short term revenue can hurt long and medium term revenue, and thus degrade the value of the company. Of course if you're already hunting for the next gig in another company, then the short term bonuses may be the only things that matter.

I cannot find the source but I think it was Rushkoff who used a wonderful phrase: extracting wealth by destroying value.

It highlights the underlying problem better than anything I can come up with.

it's not that revenue itself is evil , it's that when revenue takes precedence in a project where that was never the case evil things tend to occur.

From other comments here, it sounds like data shows that this one is good for users. You can argue that other extensions might help, but this one has had an actual investigation done proving its benefit.

It seems likely that there are lots of other extensions that would also pass the bar of "users" (even 'lots of users'!) "like it in tests".

(Also, not to be nit-picky but because I think it's an important distinction, I don't think the investigation here "proved its benefit", but rather showed only that those users tested liked it. I suspect every designer would agree that bundling everything a user wants leads, almost paradoxically, to an unuseable mess.)

There might be more. But tests are time-consuming and can't be done on everything. Also, the number of addons you want to preinstall has to be quite small - past a certain limit, it's too much clutter in the UI, as you correctly said (and indeed the number is very tiny: Pocket, Hello, and Search if you count that).

Given the data available, Firefox is a better browser with Pocket than without, on average, for Firefox users. That's justification for bundling it. Perhaps more data will be collected and other addons might be considered later, but again, the bar gets higher and higher since the total number has to remain small.

> Also, the number of addons you want to preinstall has to be quite small - past a certain limit, it's too much clutter in the UI, as you correctly said (and indeed the number is very tiny: Pocket, Hello, and Search if you count that).

I think that the wording here is important: Pocket is not an add-on, at least in the sense that I understand it: when I go to Tools > Add-ons, nothing there allows me to disable or remove it. (I can't find it now, but I thought that one used to be able to manage search providers in a similar window.) Add-ons are by their nature trivial to disable or remove, and a solution involving going into about:config, where the user is explicitly warned of the dangers—in language far more frightening to a non-techie than any opt-in could be—is not trivial at all.

That's true. As mburns commented above, it looks like the goal is in fact to do the extra work in order to turn Pocket into an addon, for the reasons you mention.

Dude, an ad-blocker is a no-brainer for an addon that basically every user would love. For instance because your playlists on youtube no longer get interrupted by awful ads, and thus serve as a decent radio.

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/03/27/firefox-39-tracking-protect...

Adding a useful feature that also does evil things behind the scenes can be seen a net positive for (uninformed?) users, but that is still not an excuse for piggybacking the evil things.

You should let users have all the value from new useful features, instead of just keeping the balance barely positive after bundling some bad stuff.

There was an interesting observation on moz-dev last month:

Firefox users like to download videos. A lot. 15 of the top 40 add-ons downloaded this week are video downloaders

So they certainly know what users like... and then ignore that data.

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-June/002...

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