7 ms·

How Firefox is using Pocket to try to build a better news feed than Facebook

116 points by sus_007 8y ago

zaarn 8y ago
I'm really excited on what Mozilla is doing with Pocket and I hope it continues down that path. Currently my only gripe is that I cannot download the archived version of webpages I have and not easily make public link collections (atleast as far as I've seen), for which I currently use Shaarli... Otherwise it's a cool product.
- m-localhost 8y ago
  Here is my backup chain for articles I want to read later/archive against link rot: I run my own Wallabag instance (self-hosted pocket). Wallabag offers an rss feed for all new articles that triggers IFTTT to a) save a copy to pocket (just as backup) b) save a markdown version of the article to dropbox (via http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?read=1&preview=0&showframe=0&u=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.mozilla.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F09%2F26%2Ffirefox-quantum-beta-developer-edition%2F http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?read=1&preview=0&showframe=0&...) Wallabag also offers automatic tagging rules and RSS feeds to each tag. https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en
SyneRyder 8y ago
I'm nervous about a Pocket news feed in Firefox. The idea sounds promising, but in practice Pocket's Discovery feature surfaces a kind of pseudo-personalized clickbait that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Here's some of the stories my Pocket Discovery feed found for me today: "Why your brain hates other people" "The most hated Bachelor in America explains himself" "You're doing Scrum wrong and here's how to fix it" "Fund managers warn a downturn is coming and it's going to be ugly" "The dangers of belly fat" It's lots of outrage & negativity, and I imagine it's because that's the kind of article people are actually reading & sharing, so that's what feeds the recommendation algorithms. I don't mind if Pocket develops a personalized profile of my interests, but I'd like it to surface what I want to see. Right now YouTube does a better job of detecting my interest in music hardware & album production techniques than Pocket does.
- stev0lution 8y ago
  I think there might be a point where recommendation algorithms kind of 'overfit'/become a filter bubble. I remember reading a article about the youtube recommendation algorithm led to increasingly more radical videos until you end up on 'that weird side' of youtube (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...). Depends entirely on what metric you are trying to opimize, I guess. With youtube is probably something like "time spent on the site". If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv or something.
  - infogulch 8y ago
    > If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv I do the YouTube equivalent and watch mostly educational channels: minutephysics, numberphile, 60 symbols, cgp grey, 3 blue 1 brown, spacetime, veritasium, codyslab, physics girl, etc. computerphile for checking my layman's terms explanations of computer concepts.
  - droidist2 8y ago
    For some reason YouTube assumes I really like Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love and recommends it from almost every video I watch. A look at the comments suggests I'm not the only one this happens to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso
    - yborg 8y ago
      Or maybe someone at YouTube just has great taste ;)
- zouhair 8y ago
  But even if it is tailored to your liking, you'll also suffer from a worse bubble than we all already suffer from.
- mcbits 8y ago
  I tried to use Pocket a while back. First it put me in an HN cluster where it would recommend all the articles posted on HN that I didn't save to Pocket because I wasn't interested. Then I intentionally avoided saving articles from HN and just saved any decent blog posts related to programming. One of those must have mentioned Merkle trees or something because it started recommending "5 ways Bitcoin will make your farts smell better" etc. Then I gave up.
bhhaskin 8y ago
Why can't my web browser just browse the web? Why does it need to be a news feed as well?
- trendia 8y ago
  I moved to the ESR branch specifically to get a web browser that just browses the web. (It's the default in Debian for that very reason!) However, version 60 added pocket, along with other "features" such as the optional Firefox experiments (where, if you opt in, they track your user behavior to improve the browser). Guess I'll be looking for a new browser again.
  - windlep 8y ago
    Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done. Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience, that's why the ability to easily remove options you might not like will always exist. If/when this ever changes, that would be a significant departure from their Mission statement.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      > Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done. Thanks, I never noticed the '...' menu. Now my new tabs are refreshingly empty. I just don't understand why a '...' was even necessary, all of the options would still have fit nicely when expanded to a horizontal bar. I blame whitespace-driven design.
    - trendia 8y ago
      > Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox. Further, when Mozilla first integrated it into Firefox, there was no way to remove it, only hide the icon: > "This page http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.. http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.... 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." Only after severe backlash [0] did Mozilla decide the best way to handle it was to purchase Pocket. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667809
jes5199 8y ago
I tried to switch back to Firefox, but my password manager (lastpass) doesn’t work correctly, I guess the new extension APIs are too restrictiy. So, Chrome it is.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  That's Firefox fault? Bitwarden works perfectly fine with the latest FF.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    If I want to use LastPass (or any other popular extension), and it does not work in a particular browser, I don't care whose fault that is -- I won't use that browser. If Firefox is going to regain any of its former glory, it needs to be easy for people to switch to without making sacrifices.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      It needs to be easy and clear for developers to port their extension. Ie. good documentation. Whether it is or not, I don't know. It feels unfair if you blame only Mozilla for your issue though. It only seems to be that way because Mozilla changed something. But developers knew well in advance about this change. If Photoshop doesn't work on the latest Windows version, do you blame Microsoft or Adobe? It'd depend on the nature of the issue but generally Microsoft allows developers to plan ahead. Why did an extension like Bitwarden (a one man project) get their shit together while LastPass (with a big corp like LogMeIn behind it) not? If it were the other way around, I'd have understanding. Also, Bitwarden is open source, cheaper than LastPass (half the price if you want 2FA), you can even run the cloud backend locally if you prefer, and you can convert from LastPass (its only a CSV IIRC). This comment on LastPass support forums sums it up: "I have had this submitted as a trouble ticket for almost a month now ... support simply sucks" [1] https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&start=150#p1006835 https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&star...
      - 8y ago
bag123 8y ago
Pocket seems fairly incompatible with Firefox - claims to be client side yet requires a login and does not work if cookies are disabled...
cJ0th 8y ago
People do complain about FBs feed but they don't really care. If I were to ask you whether you'd like to sleep one more hour in the morning then you answering "yes" wouldn't imply that you don't get enough sleep. A technically better solution alone isn't convincing. They need a service that delights at least some people. And so I think their chances would be higher (but still pretty low) if they were spending serious amounts of money on a campaign to promote RSS and a service similar to google reader. That way they'd at least get tech-savy people on board who would then act as evangelists for them.
forapurpose 8y ago
People are overlooking how critical this technology could be for privacy, mass surveillance, and all its consequences: Personalization has been the selling point, albeit disingenuously, for the surveillance. It may be true that people won't use technologies which provide confidentiality if it means giving up personalization. A solution that does the personalization locally and with local data, thus preserving confidentiality, and which is open and free, could be pivotal. The same was true with Firefox' customized home page ads of a few years ago. Everyone focused on 'advertising in Firefox', and overlooked the critical work they were doing: solving the problem of advertising, a seeming necessary evil, with confidentiality. In the uproar, the great value of that work was lost (IIRC).
ve55 8y ago
These things do not belong in Firefox. Firefox should be a standalone web browser that focuses on security, privacy, efficiency, and customization. Not Chome+Social Media 2.0.
- fuckyouzilla 8y ago
  What is Firefox?
- fuckyouzilla1 8y ago
  What is Firefox?
- shock 8y ago
  I probably would have agreed with you in the past, but not anymore. Here's why: I was having coffee with a friend today and he mentioned he was thinking about opening a facebook account – here's the kicker: the reason he wanted to get a FB account was the news feed; he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new. I mentioned RSS; he was flabbergasted. He didn't know such a thing exists. I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.
  - jxcl 8y ago
    On my version (60.0.2), I can click the hamburger menu on the right side of the address bar, click customize... and there's a "subscribe" button with the RSS logo that can be dropped onto the address bar or the overflow bar.
  - KwanEsq 8y ago
    It's hidden away now, you have to open the "Page Info" window, available most-readily from the page's context menu, then go to the Feeds tab, select a feed and hit the subscribe button that appears, and it'll take you to the feed itself, where Fx shows its subscription interface (which you can get to directly if the page is helpful enough to provide its own link to the feed, as I think WordPress used to do by default in its meta links section back in the day). However there's a distinct possibility said subscription interface will go away in future. (Whether or not the list of feeds in Page Info would go away at the same time is less clear)
megaman22 8y ago
Man, why can't we just use RSS as it was intended?
- shock 8y ago
  Because almost nobody non technical knows about it. Not even all developers know about it.
  - class4behavior 8y ago
    Well, that is, as a relative share, in absolute numbers it is still enough for services like inoreader to do fairly well.
- kart23 8y ago
  Side note, does anyone know of a good RSS reader for android? Innoreader is what I'm using atm.
chalkandpaste 8y ago
I disabled everything from Pocket I possibly can when I downloaded and setup Firefox, in the `about:config`. That integration annoys me to no end. Who decided I needed pocket in my browser?
- abrowne 8y ago
  I do the same, but it's not for us (who know about:config exists).
- twblalock 8y ago
  I wish they would remove the feature. People who really want Pocket can install an extension.
  - pdkl95 8y ago
    They could even be adventurous and offer multiple downloads with different extension bundles. These would be easy to implement; because extension bundling already exists as "collections"[1]. Something like: - Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download) - Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers") - Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development. - Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc. Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ [2] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...
  - jamienicol 8y ago
    Why is that better than the current situation, where people who really dislike pocket can disable the feature?
- bscphil 8y ago
  The belief most people have that Mozilla puts things in the browser they expect to be useful to users is mistaken and needs to die. They didn't decide you needed Pocket in your browser. They wanted Pocket in your browser, so that they could sell story spots (read: ads) to the highest bidder. They discuss advertising in the browser chrome here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy-conscious-approach-to-sponsored-content/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy... Note the PR-speak in that article. Advertising, by its very nature, cannot "provide value to users". If a publisher is paying to promote a story, it's because they want the story to capture more of users' attention than the users themselves want.
theweb1 8y ago
Firefox needs to get in the game and throw chrome an elbow, i'm tired of google dominating every field.
twblalock 8y ago
Every time Mozilla does something like this, or a promotion like the Mr. Robot thing, they remove a differentiator between Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla is making it easier to think thoughts like this: If Firefox is just as bad as the other browsers, you might as well use the most popular one.
- dublinben 8y ago
  The most important differentiator will always remain that Firefox is free software and Chrome is the proprietary expression of the largest advertising company in the world. Anything else either of them does is peripheral to that.
  - narag 8y ago
    IIRC Chromium is free software, even if it is a proprietary expression of something. There's only so much bs you can pull before people has you figured out. I still use Firefox, but it's been years since any news about it made me happy. Seriously considering now to compile Chromium myself and use it as my main browser.
    - Sylos 8y ago
      Chromium is technically free software, yes, but it's a horrible example of it. Because Google entirely controls code contributions to it. Only a fork could be amended the way that the community wants it. The same is obviously true for Firefox, with Mozilla being the gatekeeper, but this is where non-profit vs. for-profit does come back into play. As for bad things in Chromium, as well as a fork that tries to fix it: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium As for news articles: When Mozilla does things, they're open about it, which is why news articles get written about their fuck-ups. And they're held to a much higher standard by journalists, as they are a non-profit. When Google does something shitty on the other hand, people are quick to dismiss it as them needing to make money somehow. And there's lots of instances where Firefox goes the extra mile, where Chromium conveniently forgets about it and then no one blames them, because it is the extra mile, not the standard among browsers. A prominent example is Chrome Sync. It's not end-to-end-encrypted and Google does state in their Privacy Policy that they use the browsing history submitted to them with Sync for other purposes. Your browsing history being stored on Google's server in decryptable form also means that NSA, CIA, FBI have access to it. You can make it end-to-end-encrypted, which however requires a second password and is therefore something that only users will do that really care about it. Basically, it's there to calm those that would complain otherwise. Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. And this is just the biggest and clearest example. We're talking about millions of lines of code with tens of thousands of design decisions. Google will have opted every time for the option that's not yet quite bad enough to gather bad press. Mozilla on the other hand has no reason not to protect users, if possible, even if it does not gather them good press.

116 points by sus_007 8y ago

I'm really excited on what Mozilla is doing with Pocket and I hope it continues down that path. Currently my only gripe is that I cannot download the archived version of webpages I have and not easily make public link collections (atleast as far as I've seen), for which I currently use Shaarli... Otherwise it's a cool product.

m-localhost 8y ago
Here is my backup chain for articles I want to read later/archive against link rot: I run my own Wallabag instance (self-hosted pocket). Wallabag offers an rss feed for all new articles that triggers IFTTT to a) save a copy to pocket (just as backup) b) save a markdown version of the article to dropbox (via http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?read=1&preview=0&showframe=0&u=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.mozilla.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F09%2F26%2Ffirefox-quantum-beta-developer-edition%2F http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?read=1&preview=0&showframe=0&...) Wallabag also offers automatic tagging rules and RSS feeds to each tag. https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en

SyneRyder 8y ago

I'm nervous about a Pocket news feed in Firefox. The idea sounds promising, but in practice Pocket's Discovery feature surfaces a kind of pseudo-personalized clickbait that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Here's some of the stories my Pocket Discovery feed found for me today: "Why your brain hates other people" "The most hated Bachelor in America explains himself" "You're doing Scrum wrong and here's how to fix it" "Fund managers warn a downturn is coming and it's going to be ugly" "The dangers of belly fat" It's lots of outrage & negativity, and I imagine it's because that's the kind of article people are actually reading & sharing, so that's what feeds the recommendation algorithms. I don't mind if Pocket develops a personalized profile of my interests, but I'd like it to surface what I want to see. Right now YouTube does a better job of detecting my interest in music hardware & album production techniques than Pocket does.

stev0lution 8y ago
I think there might be a point where recommendation algorithms kind of 'overfit'/become a filter bubble. I remember reading a article about the youtube recommendation algorithm led to increasingly more radical videos until you end up on 'that weird side' of youtube (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...). Depends entirely on what metric you are trying to opimize, I guess. With youtube is probably something like "time spent on the site". If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv or something.
- infogulch 8y ago
  > If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv I do the YouTube equivalent and watch mostly educational channels: minutephysics, numberphile, 60 symbols, cgp grey, 3 blue 1 brown, spacetime, veritasium, codyslab, physics girl, etc. computerphile for checking my layman's terms explanations of computer concepts.
- droidist2 8y ago
  For some reason YouTube assumes I really like Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love and recommends it from almost every video I watch. A look at the comments suggests I'm not the only one this happens to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso
  - yborg 8y ago
    Or maybe someone at YouTube just has great taste ;)
zouhair 8y ago
But even if it is tailored to your liking, you'll also suffer from a worse bubble than we all already suffer from.
mcbits 8y ago
I tried to use Pocket a while back. First it put me in an HN cluster where it would recommend all the articles posted on HN that I didn't save to Pocket because I wasn't interested. Then I intentionally avoided saving articles from HN and just saved any decent blog posts related to programming. One of those must have mentioned Merkle trees or something because it started recommending "5 ways Bitcoin will make your farts smell better" etc. Then I gave up.

bhhaskin 8y ago

Why can't my web browser just browse the web? Why does it need to be a news feed as well?

trendia 8y ago
I moved to the ESR branch specifically to get a web browser that just browses the web. (It's the default in Debian for that very reason!) However, version 60 added pocket, along with other "features" such as the optional Firefox experiments (where, if you opt in, they track your user behavior to improve the browser). Guess I'll be looking for a new browser again.
- windlep 8y ago
  Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done. Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience, that's why the ability to easily remove options you might not like will always exist. If/when this ever changes, that would be a significant departure from their Mission statement.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done. Thanks, I never noticed the '...' menu. Now my new tabs are refreshingly empty. I just don't understand why a '...' was even necessary, all of the options would still have fit nicely when expanded to a horizontal bar. I blame whitespace-driven design.
  - trendia 8y ago
    > Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox. Further, when Mozilla first integrated it into Firefox, there was no way to remove it, only hide the icon: > "This page http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.. http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.... 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." Only after severe backlash [0] did Mozilla decide the best way to handle it was to purchase Pocket. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667809

jes5199 8y ago

I tried to switch back to Firefox, but my password manager (lastpass) doesn’t work correctly, I guess the new extension APIs are too restrictiy. So, Chrome it is.

Fnoord 8y ago
That's Firefox fault? Bitwarden works perfectly fine with the latest FF.
- twblalock 8y ago
  If I want to use LastPass (or any other popular extension), and it does not work in a particular browser, I don't care whose fault that is -- I won't use that browser. If Firefox is going to regain any of its former glory, it needs to be easy for people to switch to without making sacrifices.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    It needs to be easy and clear for developers to port their extension. Ie. good documentation. Whether it is or not, I don't know. It feels unfair if you blame only Mozilla for your issue though. It only seems to be that way because Mozilla changed something. But developers knew well in advance about this change. If Photoshop doesn't work on the latest Windows version, do you blame Microsoft or Adobe? It'd depend on the nature of the issue but generally Microsoft allows developers to plan ahead. Why did an extension like Bitwarden (a one man project) get their shit together while LastPass (with a big corp like LogMeIn behind it) not? If it were the other way around, I'd have understanding. Also, Bitwarden is open source, cheaper than LastPass (half the price if you want 2FA), you can even run the cloud backend locally if you prefer, and you can convert from LastPass (its only a CSV IIRC). This comment on LastPass support forums sums it up: "I have had this submitted as a trouble ticket for almost a month now ... support simply sucks" [1] https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&start=150#p1006835 https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&star...
    - 8y ago

bag123 8y ago

Pocket seems fairly incompatible with Firefox - claims to be client side yet requires a login and does not work if cookies are disabled...

cJ0th 8y ago

People do complain about FBs feed but they don't really care. If I were to ask you whether you'd like to sleep one more hour in the morning then you answering "yes" wouldn't imply that you don't get enough sleep. A technically better solution alone isn't convincing. They need a service that delights at least some people. And so I think their chances would be higher (but still pretty low) if they were spending serious amounts of money on a campaign to promote RSS and a service similar to google reader. That way they'd at least get tech-savy people on board who would then act as evangelists for them.

forapurpose 8y ago

People are overlooking how critical this technology could be for privacy, mass surveillance, and all its consequences: Personalization has been the selling point, albeit disingenuously, for the surveillance. It may be true that people won't use technologies which provide confidentiality if it means giving up personalization. A solution that does the personalization locally and with local data, thus preserving confidentiality, and which is open and free, could be pivotal. The same was true with Firefox' customized home page ads of a few years ago. Everyone focused on 'advertising in Firefox', and overlooked the critical work they were doing: solving the problem of advertising, a seeming necessary evil, with confidentiality. In the uproar, the great value of that work was lost (IIRC).

ve55 8y ago

These things do not belong in Firefox. Firefox should be a standalone web browser that focuses on security, privacy, efficiency, and customization. Not Chome+Social Media 2.0.

fuckyouzilla 8y ago
What is Firefox?
fuckyouzilla1 8y ago
What is Firefox?
shock 8y ago
I probably would have agreed with you in the past, but not anymore. Here's why: I was having coffee with a friend today and he mentioned he was thinking about opening a facebook account – here's the kicker: the reason he wanted to get a FB account was the news feed; he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new. I mentioned RSS; he was flabbergasted. He didn't know such a thing exists. I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.
- jxcl 8y ago
  On my version (60.0.2), I can click the hamburger menu on the right side of the address bar, click customize... and there's a "subscribe" button with the RSS logo that can be dropped onto the address bar or the overflow bar.
- KwanEsq 8y ago
  It's hidden away now, you have to open the "Page Info" window, available most-readily from the page's context menu, then go to the Feeds tab, select a feed and hit the subscribe button that appears, and it'll take you to the feed itself, where Fx shows its subscription interface (which you can get to directly if the page is helpful enough to provide its own link to the feed, as I think WordPress used to do by default in its meta links section back in the day). However there's a distinct possibility said subscription interface will go away in future. (Whether or not the list of feeds in Page Info would go away at the same time is less clear)

megaman22 8y ago

Man, why can't we just use RSS as it was intended?

shock 8y ago
Because almost nobody non technical knows about it. Not even all developers know about it.
- class4behavior 8y ago
  Well, that is, as a relative share, in absolute numbers it is still enough for services like inoreader to do fairly well.
kart23 8y ago
Side note, does anyone know of a good RSS reader for android? Innoreader is what I'm using atm.

chalkandpaste 8y ago

I disabled everything from Pocket I possibly can when I downloaded and setup Firefox, in the `about:config`. That integration annoys me to no end. Who decided I needed pocket in my browser?

abrowne 8y ago
I do the same, but it's not for us (who know about:config exists).
twblalock 8y ago
I wish they would remove the feature. People who really want Pocket can install an extension.
- pdkl95 8y ago
  They could even be adventurous and offer multiple downloads with different extension bundles. These would be easy to implement; because extension bundling already exists as "collections"[1]. Something like: - Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download) - Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers") - Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development. - Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc. Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/ [2] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...
- jamienicol 8y ago
  Why is that better than the current situation, where people who really dislike pocket can disable the feature?
bscphil 8y ago
The belief most people have that Mozilla puts things in the browser they expect to be useful to users is mistaken and needs to die. They didn't decide you needed Pocket in your browser. They wanted Pocket in your browser, so that they could sell story spots (read: ads) to the highest bidder. They discuss advertising in the browser chrome here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy-conscious-approach-to-sponsored-content/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy... Note the PR-speak in that article. Advertising, by its very nature, cannot "provide value to users". If a publisher is paying to promote a story, it's because they want the story to capture more of users' attention than the users themselves want.

theweb1 8y ago

Firefox needs to get in the game and throw chrome an elbow, i'm tired of google dominating every field.

twblalock 8y ago

Every time Mozilla does something like this, or a promotion like the Mr. Robot thing, they remove a differentiator between Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla is making it easier to think thoughts like this: If Firefox is just as bad as the other browsers, you might as well use the most popular one.

dublinben 8y ago
The most important differentiator will always remain that Firefox is free software and Chrome is the proprietary expression of the largest advertising company in the world. Anything else either of them does is peripheral to that.
- narag 8y ago
  IIRC Chromium is free software, even if it is a proprietary expression of something. There's only so much bs you can pull before people has you figured out. I still use Firefox, but it's been years since any news about it made me happy. Seriously considering now to compile Chromium myself and use it as my main browser.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    Chromium is technically free software, yes, but it's a horrible example of it. Because Google entirely controls code contributions to it. Only a fork could be amended the way that the community wants it. The same is obviously true for Firefox, with Mozilla being the gatekeeper, but this is where non-profit vs. for-profit does come back into play. As for bad things in Chromium, as well as a fork that tries to fix it: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium As for news articles: When Mozilla does things, they're open about it, which is why news articles get written about their fuck-ups. And they're held to a much higher standard by journalists, as they are a non-profit. When Google does something shitty on the other hand, people are quick to dismiss it as them needing to make money somehow. And there's lots of instances where Firefox goes the extra mile, where Chromium conveniently forgets about it and then no one blames them, because it is the extra mile, not the standard among browsers. A prominent example is Chrome Sync. It's not end-to-end-encrypted and Google does state in their Privacy Policy that they use the browsing history submitted to them with Sync for other purposes. Your browsing history being stored on Google's server in decryptable form also means that NSA, CIA, FBI have access to it. You can make it end-to-end-encrypted, which however requires a second password and is therefore something that only users will do that really care about it. Basically, it's there to calm those that would complain otherwise. Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. And this is just the biggest and clearest example. We're talking about millions of lines of code with tens of thousands of design decisions. Google will have opted every time for the option that's not yet quite bad enough to gather bad press. Mozilla on the other hand has no reason not to protect users, if possible, even if it does not gather them good press.