8 ms·

I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to support open

I was perfectly fine with this right up until I clicked through to their support page, which pushes Pocket as an alternative. How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Get rid of RSS and link me to an extension when I open a feed, fine, but then stop shipping Pocket without giving me a way to uninstall it as well.

ihuman 8y ago
> How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Because Mozilla owns Pocket https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  This isn't about owning not owning pocket, its about paying for pocket development, while claiming that rss is too big of a burden to maintain.
  - dralley 8y ago
    Relative to usage? Because only 0.01% of Firefox users have ever used Live Bookmarks. I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
    - kibwen 8y ago
      As someone who has used Firefox almost exclusively since 2004 (ok, there was a year or two of Opera in there...) and as the sort of power user who continues to doggedly consume RSS to this day... yeah, I've never used Live Bookmarks. I remember seeing them in my bookmarks bar on fresh Firefox installs back in the day. The interface just wasn't amenable to my use patterns, and Google Reader was (these days I'm on Feedly).
      - reitanqild 8y ago
        I too never got Live bookmarks. I'm using feedbro now.
    - emn13 8y ago
      As a user that did use Live bookmarks I would be pretty pissed off if anyone merely by my usage counted me as an excuse to keep supporting that nonsense. I use pocket now - lightly. It's still heck of a lot better than live bookmarks. Live bookmarks never worked very well, now did it? What percentage of people complaining about this are actually using the RSS support in FF itself at this moment?
troydavis 8y ago
Mozilla's ownership of Pocket taints basically every decision Mozilla makes about Firefox's content consumption features. Maybe they really are independent, but there's no way to tell and Mozilla's past transparency failures (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653) haven't earned them the benefit of the doubt.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  So the issue you're referencing is when they put the code for an easter egg in a dumb spot, which made people rightfully confused and worried. What does that have to do with independence and transparency?
  - albedoa 8y ago
    > What does that have to do with independence and transparency? It was a marketing stunt performed in partnership with a television show and was installed without the user's knowledge or consent.
  - newacctjhro 8y ago
    It wasn't an easter egg, it was advertising. Preinstalled in my fucking web browser.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag. It was not advertising. It was an easter egg.
      - reitanqild 8y ago
        Background: I've been a Firefox fan for maybe 10 years and I still consider myself to be one > It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag. It destroyed a lot of trust. Seriously. I too was really confused when I suddenly saw an extension I never installed. (This could happen before when desktop installers could add extensions but I don't think they can anymore so I was properly confused until K searched for it on the Internet.) > It was not advertising. It was an easter egg. Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
wmeredith 8y ago
The Pocket nonsense is what chased me away from Firefox.
- adtac 8y ago
  It is worth mentioning that you can completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox using a flag. Not a solution, though, just a workaround (for now). (Completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox, the browser. Not Mozilla, the company.)
- owaislone 8y ago
  Did you move to Chrome or something else entirely?
- the_clarence 8y ago
  Nonsense. Pocket and tree style tabs are what make firefox the best browsing experience.
- emn13 8y ago
  What did you switch to?
paxys 8y ago
Also Pocket is nothing like an RSS client.
- jasonlotito 8y ago
  No, they aren't. People actually use Pocket.
  - cpburns2009 8y ago
    People actually use Pocket? I know people use RSS but I didn't know Pocket was used.
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      You know people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature in Firefox?
  - LUmBULtERA 8y ago
    I know a lot of people who use RSS, but no one who uses Pocket...
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      > I know a lot of people who use RSS, but no one who uses Pocket... You know a lot of people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature. Because you didn't say anything about he feature, but RSS in general. I use RSS. I didn't use the feature in Firefox.
    - jbigelow76 8y ago
      Pocket is to the web as tupperware is to dinner leftovers, something I tell myself I'll consume later so I better save it, but really I just end up throwing it away two weeks later and having another container to clean.
jccalhoun 8y ago
They mention it most of the way through the page after linking to rss addons and a wikipedia entry on feed agregators. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... I think that's a pretty mild way to push pocket.
__jal 8y ago
Yeah, that's just Mozilla attempting to save a stupid sunk-cost. Pocket:RSS::allowance:salary. I feel like we're entering a period when a browser shakeup is in order. Chrome is spyware. Safari is usually an implementation laggard. Firefox makes a seemingly endless stream of stupid, annoying choices. (Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now.) Seems like it is time, again, for something that sucks less.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now. Edge. It somehow manages to be worse than IE in many circumstances (including being used to view Microsoft's own websites).
- emn13 8y ago
  Are you basing this on the huge costs for pocket? I use pocket; it's better than nothing. Also: if it weren't for pocket, FF would have some difficulty competing with Googles suggestions, which are pretty OK, really, and definitely enough to keep me occasionally entertained - and without killer feature to beat chrome, why pick FF over chrome at all? (Some context: I used to use chrome precisely for that reason, and recently switched back because the suggestion feature appears to work less well now, and FF's version is good enough).
- alwillis 8y ago
  The Safari team has quietly kicking ass regarding web and privacy features: https://webkit.org/status/ https://webkit.org/status/
- alwillis 8y ago
  Brave just recently past 4 million MAU and has made lots of progress the past year: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
JoshMnem 8y ago
I don't mind the Pocket button, but Pocket shouldn't be considered a replacement for RSS/Atom. People need to be able to choose what information they consume, not leave it to algorithms. Algorithmic news feeds are one of the current problems with information on the Web. I hope the browser will still suggest feed-reading extensions when users land on feeds. Not doing that would be shady.
- newuser12344 8y ago
  I also don't mind the pocket button and I actually want to use it to save my bookmarks. But two things are making that hard for me: 1) My employer has disabled the button in firefox. I can work around this by signing in in any browser but there is something weird that happens. I think I have to allow all kinds of google javascript spyware to run some kind of captcha to be able to sign in. 2) The saved links do not refer to the original sites I've saved. They are some kind of click-through tracking spyware. Also the tagging feature seems hard to use. As I recall it seemed difficult to filter using multiple tags. If it was more like Delicious I'd be happy with it.
- branchless 8y ago
  I just use pocket to mark articles I want to read later, then I read them later.
tareqak 8y ago
I agree. If Mozilla doesn't have the resources to maintain RSS and Atom, then it feels weird for them to still work on Pocket. I know that they aren't interchangeable, but it is a confusing trade-off on their part.
d904c456-015d 8y ago
Also worth pointing out that, even though it's been over a year and half since the Pocket acquisition, the only thing about Pocket that's been open sourced is still just the browser extension junk to integrate it with Firefox. So it goes like this: 1. Firefox adds integration with a commercial, closed source service (Pocket) 2. People get up in arms about it 3. Mozilla issues some specially crafted statements about the relationship with Pocket (the decision to ship Pocket "has absolutely nothing to do with money"—it's only shipping because Firefox PMs like Pocket); so even if they are receiving kickbacks, this can arguably still be true, but it's widely understood to mean that there's no money changing hands 4. Mozilla's own employees who were taken in by the PR begin showing up in conversations thereafter and explicitly saying there's no money changing hands—because they don't know any more than what everyone else was told in #3 5. It's later revealed that there has, in fact, been a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket, contra claims otherwise 6. It's reported that Mozilla is finally just going to acquire Pocket, and it will become open source 7. Concerns are abated; people move on 8. There is no #8. The open source thing was never true. Pocket remains about as open source as it was before the acquisition.
- gregknicholson 8y ago
  It was an odd decision to promote Pocket given that Wallabag already existed as an open source alternative. I support Mozilla's mission, which is why I hate Pocket. It's not just obnoxious — it goes against everything Mozilla is supposed to stand for.
xtat 8y ago
ex-pocketeer here and I'm with you guys on a lot of this - honestly the acquisition was confusing to me vis a vis mozilla's most important core values all that said, I learned just now that firefox had RSS/ATOM support. Public open standard feeds should never die, but how was this in-browser feature ever useful?
- zmix 8y ago
  You clicked an RSS icon in the URL bar. A page would pop up, showing the RSS feed styled. Below you would have the choice to subscribe with any configured feed reader, be it desktop or web-service. Totally fit into the browser as a standard tool.
choward 8y ago
Seriously? Pocket as the replacement? The thing that shows me three articles with click bait titles on my homepage? Yep. That's just like RSS...
- jjeaff 8y ago
  I wonder if you have your privacy settings set as to not allow Firefox to see what you view. Because I have noticed that the articles that get suggested to me have been really spot on for the kind of stuff I like to read. Not click batey for the most part, although occasionally one will feel like an ad placement that they really want me to click.
LiveTheDream 8y ago
Leaving this for anyone who is trying to disable Pocket... Go to `about:config`, search for `extensions.pocket.enabled` and switch to `false`. Not as good as uninstalling, but at least disabling is possible.
Vinnl 8y ago
A pet peeve of mine, but: "bloat" is such empty criticism. It's just repeating that one doesn't care for something, e.g. there are people who claim a tab bar in the browser is bloat and is not related to surfing the web. When people mention bloat, that usually comes down to wanting to inflate the importance of their criticism. So in this case, the criticism comes down to: I don't like Pocket, and it's centralised. Which I don't think is very strong; the exact same point could be made about Firefox Sync: "they're pushing a bloated built-in centralised service that is very difficult to turn off entirely". Technically true, but really not a compelling argument to remove it or to make it easy to remove all mentions of Firefox Sync from the interface.
GordonS 8y ago
I actually use and like Pocket, but I don't see how it could be considered a replacement for RSS?

ihuman 8y ago

> How can they claim to support open standards on the web and lower maintenance overhead while still pushing their bloated built in centralized service that is very difficult to turn off entirely even though it should just be one button? Because Mozilla owns Pocket https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...

throwaway2048 8y ago
This isn't about owning not owning pocket, its about paying for pocket development, while claiming that rss is too big of a burden to maintain.
- dralley 8y ago
  Relative to usage? Because only 0.01% of Firefox users have ever used Live Bookmarks. I don't know how many use Pocket but I would be shocked it it wasn't far higher.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    As someone who has used Firefox almost exclusively since 2004 (ok, there was a year or two of Opera in there...) and as the sort of power user who continues to doggedly consume RSS to this day... yeah, I've never used Live Bookmarks. I remember seeing them in my bookmarks bar on fresh Firefox installs back in the day. The interface just wasn't amenable to my use patterns, and Google Reader was (these days I'm on Feedly).
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      I too never got Live bookmarks. I'm using feedbro now.
  - emn13 8y ago
    As a user that did use Live bookmarks I would be pretty pissed off if anyone merely by my usage counted me as an excuse to keep supporting that nonsense. I use pocket now - lightly. It's still heck of a lot better than live bookmarks. Live bookmarks never worked very well, now did it? What percentage of people complaining about this are actually using the RSS support in FF itself at this moment?

troydavis 8y ago

Mozilla's ownership of Pocket taints basically every decision Mozilla makes about Firefox's content consumption features. Maybe they really are independent, but there's no way to tell and Mozilla's past transparency failures (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15956325#15956653) haven't earned them the benefit of the doubt.

Dylan16807 8y ago
So the issue you're referencing is when they put the code for an easter egg in a dumb spot, which made people rightfully confused and worried. What does that have to do with independence and transparency?
- albedoa 8y ago
  > What does that have to do with independence and transparency? It was a marketing stunt performed in partnership with a television show and was installed without the user's knowledge or consent.
- newacctjhro 8y ago
  It wasn't an easter egg, it was advertising. Preinstalled in my fucking web browser.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag. It was not advertising. It was an easter egg.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      Background: I've been a Firefox fan for maybe 10 years and I still consider myself to be one > It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag. It destroyed a lot of trust. Seriously. I too was really confused when I suddenly saw an extension I never installed. (This could happen before when desktop installers could add extensions but I don't think they can anymore so I was properly confused until K searched for it on the Internet.) > It was not advertising. It was an easter egg. Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]

wmeredith 8y ago

The Pocket nonsense is what chased me away from Firefox.

adtac 8y ago
It is worth mentioning that you can completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox using a flag. Not a solution, though, just a workaround (for now). (Completely disable Pocket integration in Firefox, the browser. Not Mozilla, the company.)
owaislone 8y ago
Did you move to Chrome or something else entirely?
the_clarence 8y ago
Nonsense. Pocket and tree style tabs are what make firefox the best browsing experience.
emn13 8y ago
What did you switch to?

paxys 8y ago

Also Pocket is nothing like an RSS client.

jasonlotito 8y ago
No, they aren't. People actually use Pocket.
- cpburns2009 8y ago
  People actually use Pocket? I know people use RSS but I didn't know Pocket was used.
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    You know people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature in Firefox?
- LUmBULtERA 8y ago
  I know a lot of people who use RSS, but no one who uses Pocket...
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    > I know a lot of people who use RSS, but no one who uses Pocket... You know a lot of people who use the RSS feature being removed from Firefox? Not RSS, but the feature. Because you didn't say anything about he feature, but RSS in general. I use RSS. I didn't use the feature in Firefox.
  - jbigelow76 8y ago
    Pocket is to the web as tupperware is to dinner leftovers, something I tell myself I'll consume later so I better save it, but really I just end up throwing it away two weeks later and having another container to clean.

jccalhoun 8y ago

They mention it most of the way through the page after linking to rss addons and a wikipedia entry on feed agregators. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacements-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement... I think that's a pretty mild way to push pocket.

__jal 8y ago

Yeah, that's just Mozilla attempting to save a stupid sunk-cost. Pocket:RSS::allowance:salary. I feel like we're entering a period when a browser shakeup is in order. Chrome is spyware. Safari is usually an implementation laggard. Firefox makes a seemingly endless stream of stupid, annoying choices. (Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now.) Seems like it is time, again, for something that sucks less.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> Never used whatever MS calls nextgen-IE now. Edge. It somehow manages to be worse than IE in many circumstances (including being used to view Microsoft's own websites).
emn13 8y ago
Are you basing this on the huge costs for pocket? I use pocket; it's better than nothing. Also: if it weren't for pocket, FF would have some difficulty competing with Googles suggestions, which are pretty OK, really, and definitely enough to keep me occasionally entertained - and without killer feature to beat chrome, why pick FF over chrome at all? (Some context: I used to use chrome precisely for that reason, and recently switched back because the suggestion feature appears to work less well now, and FF's version is good enough).
alwillis 8y ago
The Safari team has quietly kicking ass regarding web and privacy features: https://webkit.org/status/ https://webkit.org/status/
alwillis 8y ago
Brave just recently past 4 million MAU and has made lots of progress the past year: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/

JoshMnem 8y ago

I don't mind the Pocket button, but Pocket shouldn't be considered a replacement for RSS/Atom. People need to be able to choose what information they consume, not leave it to algorithms. Algorithmic news feeds are one of the current problems with information on the Web. I hope the browser will still suggest feed-reading extensions when users land on feeds. Not doing that would be shady.

newuser12344 8y ago
I also don't mind the pocket button and I actually want to use it to save my bookmarks. But two things are making that hard for me: 1) My employer has disabled the button in firefox. I can work around this by signing in in any browser but there is something weird that happens. I think I have to allow all kinds of google javascript spyware to run some kind of captcha to be able to sign in. 2) The saved links do not refer to the original sites I've saved. They are some kind of click-through tracking spyware. Also the tagging feature seems hard to use. As I recall it seemed difficult to filter using multiple tags. If it was more like Delicious I'd be happy with it.
branchless 8y ago
I just use pocket to mark articles I want to read later, then I read them later.

tareqak 8y ago

I agree. If Mozilla doesn't have the resources to maintain RSS and Atom, then it feels weird for them to still work on Pocket. I know that they aren't interchangeable, but it is a confusing trade-off on their part.

d904c456-015d 8y ago

Also worth pointing out that, even though it's been over a year and half since the Pocket acquisition, the only thing about Pocket that's been open sourced is still just the browser extension junk to integrate it with Firefox. So it goes like this: 1. Firefox adds integration with a commercial, closed source service (Pocket) 2. People get up in arms about it 3. Mozilla issues some specially crafted statements about the relationship with Pocket (the decision to ship Pocket "has absolutely nothing to do with money"—it's only shipping because Firefox PMs like Pocket); so even if they are receiving kickbacks, this can arguably still be true, but it's widely understood to mean that there's no money changing hands 4. Mozilla's own employees who were taken in by the PR begin showing up in conversations thereafter and explicitly saying there's no money changing hands—because they don't know any more than what everyone else was told in #3 5. It's later revealed that there has, in fact, been a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket, contra claims otherwise 6. It's reported that Mozilla is finally just going to acquire Pocket, and it will become open source 7. Concerns are abated; people move on 8. There is no #8. The open source thing was never true. Pocket remains about as open source as it was before the acquisition.

gregknicholson 8y ago
It was an odd decision to promote Pocket given that Wallabag already existed as an open source alternative. I support Mozilla's mission, which is why I hate Pocket. It's not just obnoxious — it goes against everything Mozilla is supposed to stand for.

xtat 8y ago

ex-pocketeer here and I'm with you guys on a lot of this - honestly the acquisition was confusing to me vis a vis mozilla's most important core values all that said, I learned just now that firefox had RSS/ATOM support. Public open standard feeds should never die, but how was this in-browser feature ever useful?

zmix 8y ago
You clicked an RSS icon in the URL bar. A page would pop up, showing the RSS feed styled. Below you would have the choice to subscribe with any configured feed reader, be it desktop or web-service. Totally fit into the browser as a standard tool.

choward 8y ago

Seriously? Pocket as the replacement? The thing that shows me three articles with click bait titles on my homepage? Yep. That's just like RSS...

jjeaff 8y ago
I wonder if you have your privacy settings set as to not allow Firefox to see what you view. Because I have noticed that the articles that get suggested to me have been really spot on for the kind of stuff I like to read. Not click batey for the most part, although occasionally one will feel like an ad placement that they really want me to click.

LiveTheDream 8y ago

Leaving this for anyone who is trying to disable Pocket... Go to `about:config`, search for `extensions.pocket.enabled` and switch to `false`. Not as good as uninstalling, but at least disabling is possible.

Vinnl 8y ago

A pet peeve of mine, but: "bloat" is such empty criticism. It's just repeating that one doesn't care for something, e.g. there are people who claim a tab bar in the browser is bloat and is not related to surfing the web. When people mention bloat, that usually comes down to wanting to inflate the importance of their criticism. So in this case, the criticism comes down to: I don't like Pocket, and it's centralised. Which I don't think is very strong; the exact same point could be made about Firefox Sync: "they're pushing a bloated built-in centralised service that is very difficult to turn off entirely". Technically true, but really not a compelling argument to remove it or to make it easy to remove all mentions of Firefox Sync from the interface.

GordonS 8y ago

I actually use and like Pocket, but I don't see how it could be considered a replacement for RSS?