

What to Expect from Firefox in the Future - gluxon
https://mail.mozilla.org//pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003062.html

======
gluxon
> Every feature in the browser should be polished, functional, and a joy to
> use. Where we can’t get it to that state, we shouldn’t do it at all. In some
> cases that will mean spending time to make it great. In other cases that
> will mean removing code that we don’t see ourselves improving any time soon.
> In other cases it will mean finding third party services or addons that can
> do the job better than we can.

Pay close attention to this. This change in philosophy around features and
incorporating third party services is going to create a Firefox that's
radically different from releases in the past. For better or worse we've
already started seeing these changes with the recent Pocket integration.

> We’re not like most organizations, so we have to partner differently. We
> worked with Pocket to amend their Privacy Policy to be more in line with our
> principles. We made sure the code that shipped with Firefox was licensed
> appropriately.

Amending Pocket's Privacy Policy is something I was not aware of, and I think
puts things in perspective. I have a little more faith in the Pocket decision
now. It shows that the move was well thought out and Mozilla wasn't a Read It
Later, Inc (Pocket's developer) pushover. Regarding the topic, Dave recognizes
the community criticism later in the email.

> But folks raised objections, and we need to address that. Some of the
> objections were about policy and strategy, and I’m not going to address
> those in this thread. But we did hear specific complaints about how the code
> was integrated. 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.
> Pocket was also given first billing on the main screen, and that may not be
> a scalable solution. We’re going to need to figure out how to best surface
> these things in our UI.

I admire this a lot. I just hope that future partnerships are announced well
in advanced and the community has time to comment on implementation. I think
integrating third party services will be an improvement, but only if executed
well. Open-minded ideas like this certainly would have avoided problems like
Microsoft's negligence of IE during the previous decade.

