
Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration - toggle
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126
======
MisterWebz
_It is so unlike Mozilla to introduce something like that, I ran a virus scan
and checked what programs had been installed recently -- I assumed it had been
put there in the same way that IE users used to get the Ask Toolbar
installed._

Exactly how I felt. What the hell were they thinking? I'm generally very
supportive of Mozilla, I even supported their initiative to put advertisements
on Firefox's start page. But bundling stuff like Pocket and Hello with Firefox
is just ridiculous. Why not make it an official extension? That way users can
easily disable or remove it.

~~~
Puts
You really start to wonder what pot they are smoking over there at Mozilla.
Standard things you would expect from a browser, like a way to easily
disabling javascript are apparently left to third-party extensions, because oh
you don't want to bloat the browser. But hey, video conferencing on the other
hand is such an essential part of the browsing experience.

~~~
sp332
They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages,
and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox
wasn't working. [http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-
kill/](http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/)

~~~
yellowapple
The vast majority of the described problems would be solved if Firefox
provided more/better documentation and help text alongside such options. Or
better yet, they could be solved by Firefox displaying warnings if pages
appear to rely on certain settings.

Javascript disabled and a site relies on it? "Hey, this site would probably
work better if you enabled Javascript, but you have it disabled. Would you
like to enable Javascript again? Or perhaps just for this page?"

SSL/TLS disabled? "Hey, so TLS is disabled, but I need it in order to show you
this web page. You want me to enable it for you?"

The overarching theme here is not that there are too many options, but that
there are too many _poorly documented_ options with _poorly documented_
consequences. Fixing _that_ problem would give users the best of both worlds:
flexibility and ease-of-use.

~~~
x0x0
This comment makes me strongly believe you don't speak to end users.

You can't get them to read prompts at all, let alone text on a page.

~~~
yellowapple
My comment actually comes from _lots_ of speaking to end users. I cut my teeth
on help desk and desktop support roles; understanding end-user needs is baked
pretty damn hard into my blood.

And from those discussions, and from my observations of those users, 99% of
the problems discussed would be resolved if it was clear what options actually
did. Users don't know or care what "Javascript" or "TLS" are, but you can bet
your ass that if the relevant checkboxes had at least a _basic_ explanation of
why they should be checked (i.e. "Don't uncheck this box unless you know what
you are doing; doing so will cause a lot of websites to break"), the _vast_
majority of end-users will happily leave that box unchecked until they ask
someone more knowledgable about it.

~~~
dblohm7
or somebody on a reddit thread tells them to do it.

------
jkaptur
I really like both Firefox and Pocket, but I can't imagine a good reason for
them to be integrated at this level. I searched for what justification has
been offered and found [1]. I'd love to read something more informative and
convincing.

[1] [http://www.planet-libre.org/?post_id=18514](http://www.planet-
libre.org/?post_id=18514)

~~~
azakai
I think the reason is to make them available to users. If they were in an
addon, most users would never hear about it, and even if they did, many users
don't know how to install addons.

There is data showing that Firefox users like the feature and benefit from it.
Given that, adding it to the browser makes sense.

~~~
hrjet
By that logic, why not bundle all the popular addons with Firefox? Why only a
chosen few?

~~~
hosay123
Because they're looking for new revenue streams outside of the Google
agreement, which stops paying out quite soon. It's a pretty slippery slope,
but I don't mind the tradeoff they're making in this case.

Certainly beats them taking Adobe money (or cash equivalents) to bundle Flash,
which is exactly what Chrome does (faster security updates blah blah yes I
know, but a better extension update mechanism could work just as well)

~~~
dblohm7
> Because they're looking for new revenue streams outside of the Google
> agreement, which stops paying out quite soon.

The Google agreement is already gone. Mozilla partnered with Yahoo in the US
starting in December 2014.

And again, Mozilla is not taking money in return for this integration.

------
pc2g4d
The Bugzilla ticket has been closed and people are instead being pointed at a
corresponding post on the Mozilla Governance mailing list:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/2PYq2w8tejs)

That's probably the most productive place to directly contribute to the
official conversation.

BUT it also seems that the Pocket integration wasn't previously discussed on
that mailing list. At least, that's what my cursory search seems to show:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.governanc...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mozilla.governance/pocket)

It makes me wonder whether mozilla.governance is really where these sorts of
decisions get made....

(Note: cpeterso already posted the mozilla.governance link but I felt it
deserved a top-level entry.)

~~~
gluxon
It was brought up in the Firefox Dev mailing list:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firefox-
dev/B3jJq_kU...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firefox-
dev/B3jJq_kUuIQ)

I do agree that the discussion should have been in the Mozilla Governance
mailing list though.

------
chimeracoder
Since all of the comments on this page so far seem to be opposed to the
integration:

I love Firefox's "Reader View". It's the only way that some pages are readable
on my desktop or mobile device, because so many websites try to hijack
scrolling, insert modal overlays and ads, or do all sorts of things that make
it unbelievably frustrating to just _read static text_.

On the other hand, Reader View lacks a sync feature. There was one for a few
days in Nightly, but it was buggy for the short time it existed, and it was
removed.

I was hoping Firefox would improve the sync feature and bring it back
eventually, but in all honesty, this is way better. The work that goes into
making a seamless, syncing reader view is _not_ trivial[0], and it makes more
sense for Mozilla to focus on building a browser than to reinvent the wheel
when Pocket already exists _and works incredibly well_ with the same use case.

As for whether this should be "bundled" into the browser vs. an extension: I
agree that it would be nicer philosophically if Pocket were a preinstalled
extension. On the other hand, Firefox Hello is literally a preinstalled
extension with no special integration or privileges (other than being
preinstalled), and _still_ some people made the same complaint about it when
it launched[1]. So I take that complaint with a grain of salt.

And as for the performance impact of either, I'd have to see some data
demonstrating that this actually leads to an appreciable (let alone
measurable) increase in memory or CPU usage to be convinced that simply not
using it is not an acceptable alternative.

[0] it may look that way, but there are a lot of corner cases

[1] From what I understand, Firefox Hello is simply an extension that
leverages WebRTC features already built into the browser to enable video chat
(with the assistance of a service provided by Telefonica, which assists in the
routing).

~~~
abrowne
I don't mind using Pocket as the backend, but I want it to work more like
Android's Reading List (and the reading list that was available briefly in
desktop Nightly).

I want articles to

• be readable (and savable) offline;

• open in Firefox's Reader View, not Pocket's site;

• sync with Android Fx's Reading List, not (just) the Android Pocket app.

~~~
GeorgeHahn
Do you know what happened to the reading list that existed in Nightly for a
while?

~~~
abrowne
A couple weeks ago I dug searched a bit through Bugzilla and the Mozilla wiki.
My understanding is that it was cancelled while in progress in favor of
Pocket. They also changed the Reading View styles to match Pocket's (the sepia
style was better before, imo).

------
firasd
This trend of Firefox increasingly bundling more services and features is an
interesting paradox considering that Firefox started as a quiet project to
make a slimmed down, no frills browser in comparison to the main Mozilla
browser.

I’ve recently resumed using Firefox as my main browser partly driven by
support of the project but also because Chrome was taking too much RAM and
causing performance issues. Of course, when Chrome first came out it was a
very slimmed down browser that used a lot less RAM compared to Firefox.
Everything moves in cycles…

~~~
cpeterso
Phoenix/Firefox was Mozilla's own lightweight alternative to SeaMonkey. Then
Chrome was the lightweight alternative to a memory-hogging Firefox. Now Chrome
is seen as sluggish and a memory hog. Where do we go next?

~~~
wvenable
Servo, when it's done. And from there, who knows!

~~~
cpeterso
btw, browser.html is a Servo experiment with "future UI paradigms":

[https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html/](https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html/)

~~~
Touche
It says right on the page that it doesn't use Servo.

~~~
Manishearth
[https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell](https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell)
does though

~~~
frik
I would like to switch to servo-shell sooner than later. Though there is no
Win32/64 build of Servo.

See Servo github issue "Get Servo working on Windows":
[https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/1908](https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/1908)

------
SwellJoe
I opted-in on the basis that I thought it was a Mozilla thing. I'm always
willing to try new Mozilla things because I trust Mozilla completely. Or, at
least, I did trust Mozilla completely.

I didn't know I ever had to read the fine print with anything from Mozilla,
and it turns out I was wrong.

Which, I think is why so many people feel so strongly about it. At least, it's
why I feel uncomfortable with this decision. It was not at all clear to me
that Pocket was a third party service; I'd never heard of it, and the text
describing what I was opting-in to didn't (that I recall) explicitly state who
ran the service or that it was not a Mozilla service.

I don't want to go overboard about this; this isn't like SourceForge shipping
malware. And, I don't want to make it seem like Mozilla isn't a provider and
organization that I trust. But, this chips away at my trust. I feel misled,
and I never thought I would feel that way about something Mozilla would do,
which maybe makes it worse.

------
pc2g4d
A nicely written complaint about the inclusion of Pocket in the Firefox
browser. The tone was respectful, but clear about the philosophical and
technological flaws in the inclusion of Pocket.

~~~
dblohm7
I agree, it was very well written. I wish all requests from users were this
respectful.

------
bharad
I am a Firefox user and also a Pocket user. I am on the same lines as the
author. Pocket should not be bundled into Firefox. It should be an extension
(hint: featured extension).

------
zobzu
Fuck yeah. Remove this crap. Never do it again.

Colleague working at mozilla showed me an internal email where the CEO says
they checked metrics and Tiles and Pocket did not affect Firefox, and that
their survey indicates people are okay with it.

This seems like total bs... I don't know anybody - including fx devs - that
think its a good idea. In fact earlier versions of fxnightly had their own,
not-pocket version that used sync as a backend.

------
Animats
I keep turning all that stuff off, and wonder if I missed anything. I don't
want Firefox "social integration". I don't want "Pocket" in the browser. I
don't want "Hello" snooping on my contact information. I don't want Yahoo
(Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider.

Someone may have to fork Firefox. It's still open source, more or less.

~~~
dblohm7
Hello snooping on your contact information? Where on earth did you get that
idea from?

~~~
Animats
From the Mozilla web site. It's difficult to find, though.

Mozilla has a Firefox Hello Terms of Service:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox-
hell...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox-hello/)

which claims to link to the Firefox Hello privacy terms, but actually links to
the main Mozilla privacy page:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/privacy/)

which, in a sidebar, links to the Firefox Hello privacy policy:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-
hello/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-hello/)

which links to the TokBox privacy policy:

[https://tokbox.com/support/privacy-
policy](https://tokbox.com/support/privacy-policy)

which says:

"We use the information we collect from you in the following ways: ... To
organize and carry out TokBox’s marketing or promotional operations/offers,
contests, games and similar events."

One of Hello's basic functions, at least in its mobile forms, is to cross-
reference your phone contacts and Facebook contacts. See "Review: “Hello”
Facebook Dialer, Bye to Your Privacy?"[1]

So, yes, it snoops on your contact information.

[1] [http://www.xda-developers.com/review-hello-facebook-
dialer-b...](http://www.xda-developers.com/review-hello-facebook-dialer-bye-
to-your-privacy/)

~~~
bbubble
Hello Facebook Dialer is not Firefox Hello, though.

------
omouse
Okay, develop a free/open source version. This is how it's been done in the
past; you use a proprietary version of something until there's a free software
version and then you work on the free software version until it's good enough.

Mozilla is in a heated competition with Google and other proprietary players.
It isn't a niche product, it isn't made for a small part of the population. If
adding Hello or Pocket to the browser gets more people to use Firefox or stick
with it and spurs people to create free/open source replacements then it's
alright.

The only thing I dislike is the underhanded way these changes have showed up.
As if they knew the loud minority of users/devs wouldn't like it.

------
gcb0
why stop there?

\- telefonica service for voice chat.

\- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

\- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can
stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

\- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the
browser?)

~~~
Spittie
>\- google scam site checker, phone-home component for every site you visit

I don't really like it either, but that's not how it works. Firefox downloads
an updated list of "non-safe" sites from Google every 30 minutes or so, and
check sites against the local copy. A site get sent to Google only if there is
a match in the local copy, to check that it's still "blacklisted"

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-
and-m...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-
protection-work#w_how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work-in-firefox)

>\- google services (the things responsible for ads no less) just so you can
stream videos on android (can't even build firefox without including that SDK)

It's for casting videos to a Chromecast, not for streaming videos. It seems to
be possible to build Firefox without it, F-Droid does so:
[https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=fennec&fdid=...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=fennec&fdid=org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid)

>\- adobe binary blob for DRM on netflix. (who even uses netflix on the
browser?)

I don't like it neither, but I think a small blob for DRM is better than a
whole closed addon. It's awful that it got pushed to every installation tho,
instead of displaying a "download" button on Netflix and similar sites.

As for your question, it seems that tons of people do so.

~~~
gcb0
OK so they advertise some sites you visit to Google, not all as i said.

removing Google services: fdroid goes to great pains to do that. i was
actually doing that myself before. have you ever tried? it's hours and hours
wasted changing code and scripts that were originally made optional but for
some reason they drippe dropped the checks (I'm still to have enough time to
track the commits that did this)

drm:agree with you there, no excuse not to be a download.

------
scott_karana
Add yourself to the CC list to endorse this ticket, without cluttering up the
thread with needless "I agree" posts! :-)

~~~
mordocai
Done, thanks for the tip. I wasn't sure the best way to show that I agree with
the bug. I also voted for the bug.

~~~
cpeterso
When you add yourself to a bug's CC list, every other person CC'd on the bug
is sent a "bugmail" notification that you are now CC'd. If you just vote for
the bug, you can receive bugmail notification without spamming all the other
CCs. That's what I do. :)

------
ethana
What I don't understand is that Firefox also include its own read later
service that sync to Firefox users account. Are they planning to drop its own
implementation and partner with Pocket?

~~~
dblohm7
I answered this on reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/388ryl/pocket_and_h...](http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/388ryl/pocket_and_hello_look_like_ways_to_get_sponsors/crtlabs)

------
kozukumi
I want to love Firefox like I used too but shit like this keeps putting me
off. It is the little things that are annoying me now. Pocket integration
without asking. Lack of a decent EN_GB dictionary (and I have to go and hunt
for the damn thing myself).

It is just depressing the state of browsers today. Sure they are more standard
compliant but they all suck.

------
ChrisGranger
This page
[http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h...](http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-how-
to-disable-pocket-for-firefox) purports to tell you how to disable Pocket for
Firefox, yet all it does is remove the button from the toolbar. Searching
"pocket" in about:config reveals numerous preferences that can be edited,
including _browser.pocket.enabled_ which remains set to _true_ after following
Pocket's instructions.

------
imrehg
> Bugzilla is not for discussion of product decisions.

That sounds like a very arbitrary distinction, and an argument of convenience.
Every line of code that gets into a software is a product decision one way or
another...

------
GeorgeHahn
What happened to the native Reading List? It was in Nightly for a time, but it
appears to have disappeared recently.

I love Pocket, but I was looking forward to migrating to a setup where my data
was kept private.

------
maqr
What's the best way to make this more prominent for Mozilla to see?

I made a bugzilla account and added my name to the CC list, but is there
anything else I can do to help this get more recognition?

~~~
sp332
It hasn't even been triaged yet. I'd wait to see what the devs' initial
response is before worrying that it's not getting attention.

Edit: ah, here we go
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126#c2](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126#c2)

~~~
fredoralive
I do love the way Mozilla basically say "Bugzilla isn't the place to discuss
things like this, you should discuss this down in Usenet, behind the sign that
says 'beware the leopard'" for any controversial decision.

~~~
dblohm7
Umm, it has always part of the general Bugzilla etiquette guidelines.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)

~~~
fredoralive
Mozilla is all about the web, except our governance discussions which use
something that isn't the web and hasn't been relevant for about 15 years.

The basic problem for me is that Usenet doesn't usually turn up on a vanilla
Google search, websites do. If Mozilla really is open it should really use
something more appropriate to the 21st century to decide policy and
governance.

~~~
dblohm7
Mailing lists are essential forums for a huge number of open source projects.
We're not the first to use them and we aren't going to be the last. I agree
that it's perhaps not "webby" enough but that's what we've been using since
the beginning and it's what we're using right now.

~~~
userbinator
How about a plain old online forum? That would certainly be "webby" enough and
not require much in the way of extra resources if you're already hosting
mailing list archives.

In fact I'd argue that it would probably save bandwidth as then you don't have
to mail everyone every time someone posts something which not everyone wants
to read.

------
mordocai
This bug report has been closed, we have been told to report this elsewhere.
There are already many posts on their feedback forum, I haven't seen one on
their governance forum.

------
CarloSanta4
I don't like the latest trends at Mozilla at all. I used to use Firefox for
privacy. It was small and fast and stable. I don't want to disable all the
bloatware like share, sync, Mozilla account, tab ads, pocket, chats whatever.
Mozilla is on a big sellout trip. When Mozilla is not different to Google we
can equally use Chrome - it's better anyway.

------
anonymousab
Why couldn't it have been a bundled extension? Heck, add the option to turn it
on to the update page.

At the very least it would allow people to remove it easily and entirely.

------
Siecje
What is the difference between using Pocket and a bookmark?

~~~
DonGateley
Indeed! I've asked this a couple of places and got no answer. If it is
functionally equivalent to dragging the address to a bookmark-bar folder
called Pocket I become very suspicious of motives.

~~~
SwellJoe
I was similarly confused, and still kinda am confused. Many people seem to
find it valuable beyond bookmarks, but I don't really get it.

What I _have_ been able to glean is that it re-renders the pages you save to
your pocket in a more "readable" way, and it looks more like a newspaper or
magazine or Medium blog post. Less clutter, more focus on content, at least
that's the goal.

I have my doubts about this being valuable enough to make it a standard
feature. I did whatever one has to do to opt-in when it showed up in the
Developer version...I thought it was a new Mozilla thing, which I'm always
willing to check out. I was disappointed, and surprised, that it was not a
Mozilla thing. That wasn't made clear, I don't think, in the description of
what I was opting into.

I feel a little misled by it, actually, and I don't think it's something I
want to use going forward, but I'm not sure how to opt back out. The UI is
confusing, to me.

------
paulmd
I did my part:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172218](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172218)

Even though it will cost me a buttload of time to rebuild all my cookies: fuck
Mozilla, when did they turn into SourceForge?

------
Mintwaxed
No one needs Pocket. To save anything for later viewing, simply drag & drop
the URL's icon to your desktop. When you are ready to read, click the icon.

------
netdog
A remembrance of Zawinski's law seems apropos here.

------
sp332
This bug report is not really clear. Does the submitter consider it bloat, or
a privacy violation, or what? It should be obvious that the way it appears in
Developer Edition (two releases ahead of "release") is not the way it will
appear in the final version. This report should be about the way the feature
is explained to the user, or about how hard it is to disable the feature, so
that it can be improved.

~~~
Albright
At least in my opinion, it's unnecessary bloat - just like that video chat
thing they added a couple months ago.

Remember when Firefox, the lean, scrappy browser, first came out and ran
circles around the bloated Netscape browser/HTML editor/IM client/mail
client/newsreader? The Firefox team seems to have forgotten.

If anyone is maintaining a "Firefox: Browser Only Edition" fork, I'd love to
know about it so I could use that instead.

~~~
RubyPinch
icecat, follows gnu teachings

waterfox, pale moon, also exist

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-
bas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-based)

~~~
dblohm7
I know for a fact that Pale Moon stripped all test suites from their fork of
the code. Any modifications that they have made to the browser are not fully
tested. Caveat emptor.

------
junto
Before you know it they'll be bundling in Java, ActiveX and Ask toolbar.

------
ta0967
mozilla, meet sourceforge.

