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It's a real pain, but they want the less sophisticated users to be able to take advantage of all the latest stuff and if Chrome or IE is shipping with it enable

It's a real pain, but they want the less sophisticated users to be able to take advantage of all the latest stuff and if Chrome or IE is shipping with it enabled, they have to compete. Well, that explains WebRTC at least. As for the other stuff... I'm a Pocket user, but I have no idea why that needed to be integrated into the browser, seems like an insane decision to me. I hope they got a good pay day out of that. Same as the history based advertising tiles. Sure, it's checked locally, it still seems creepy and annoying... but again, browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false. Unless we lose this level of user choice, I don't see a better alternative. It would be nice if someone would ship some tool to automatically update a user.js file, however, I think many of us have different opinions about what feature we do and do not want enabled in our browsers.

mhurron 11y ago
Off by default lets everyone choose to turn it on if they're interested. It also might clue in Mozillas devs that if they want people to turn it on, a setting in about:config isn't the only place you should be putting the button. Off by default is neither removing user choice, nor is it preventing Mozilla from saying they ship with feature X. It is the right way to present it.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  > Off by default lets everyone choose to turn it on if they're interested. It lets more sophisticated users choose. Less sophisticated users however will more likely switch to a different browser the moment a site doesn't work before poking through settings. I think a better way than a separate setting would be to go in the direction of many software firewalls and present it to the user as a choice when an application requests it as many browsers currently do with the location APIs. This would provide individual domain-level control over what permissions sites are granted by you. I don't know why this sort of policy seems to be restricted only to the location APIs...
  - mmcru 11y ago
    are there any popular sites that rely on Hello or Pocket to function?
- greiskul 11y ago
  Off by default is simply off for 99% of users.
mlinksva 11y ago
Mozilla got $0 from Pocket. Mindboggling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885360
- kuschku 11y ago
  Well, they kinda got money, in a different way: Before, mozilla was implementing their own pocket competitor. Switching to pocket, and existing solution, allowed them to save money.

mhurron 11y ago

Off by default lets everyone choose to turn it on if they're interested. It also might clue in Mozillas devs that if they want people to turn it on, a setting in about:config isn't the only place you should be putting the button. Off by default is neither removing user choice, nor is it preventing Mozilla from saying they ship with feature X. It is the right way to present it.

ultramancool 11y ago
> Off by default lets everyone choose to turn it on if they're interested. It lets more sophisticated users choose. Less sophisticated users however will more likely switch to a different browser the moment a site doesn't work before poking through settings. I think a better way than a separate setting would be to go in the direction of many software firewalls and present it to the user as a choice when an application requests it as many browsers currently do with the location APIs. This would provide individual domain-level control over what permissions sites are granted by you. I don't know why this sort of policy seems to be restricted only to the location APIs...
- mmcru 11y ago
  are there any popular sites that rely on Hello or Pocket to function?
greiskul 11y ago
Off by default is simply off for 99% of users.

mlinksva 11y ago

Mozilla got $0 from Pocket. Mindboggling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885360

kuschku 11y ago
Well, they kinda got money, in a different way: Before, mozilla was implementing their own pocket competitor. Switching to pocket, and existing solution, allowed them to save money.