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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the complaint here. Do people expect Mozilla to build everything themselves?

Reader View is a great feature that was clearly missing. Adding a third party sync to it is really no different from picking a default search engine to serve location bar entries.

Pocket is fine, best of the trio (Instapaper, Readability) IMHO. I actually switched to Pocket from Readability, which was getting buggier, a few weeks before it was integrated.

Getting all that while bringing revenue for Mozilla to support further development of Firefox is a win-win-win. Unlike Hello or "Share This Page" which I have never seen anyone use.

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The complaint is the fact that Pocket is now natively built into Firefox, which if you read the Pocket ToS, can be considered a violation of privacy. That, and the fact that because it is natively built in rather than a default extension, it cannot be removed, only disabled.

It's something that couldn't be farther from necessary. That's the complaint here.

What's the difference between removing and disabling? Aren't they effectively the same? The source is still there to read/hack. Do you care about a few lines of inactive code? If so, I'd start the purge with Hello.

I can't speak for firefox users, but when I buy a phone and it comes with a "phone company daily deals" app that that can't be removed because it's a "system component" it often seems to me that they could easily have been made it removable, and that making bloat impossible to remove was a business decision.

Perhaps firefox users feel the same way.

I love the pocket integration. The built-in functionality definitely works much better than the plugin, which was weirdly slow sometimes and had some glitches. Pocket has changed how I use the web. With a single click I send any substantive article to get automatically synced to my Kobo ereader, which also has built-in pocket integration.

It is definitely convenient -- in fact, using one system exclusively almost always provides the best user experience. (Apple has had great success with that idea.) Having Pocket bundled with eBook readers and browsers is convenient, but that doesn't fit the idea of an open web, which is what Mozilla is supposed to be supporting. I understand when Kobo does it, but Mozilla is supposed to operate under a different set of principles.

I use firefox and pocket but I still don't like that it's baked into the browser. If I change my mind and stop using pocket I can't actually get rid of it. I can disable it but without digging through the source code (which I can do but most users really can't) I have no idea what that actually means. To me that's a problem and it reduces the level of trust I have with the Mozilla organization.

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