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Mozilla Responds To Firefox User Backlash Over Pocket Integration
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, Mozilla updated Firefox to add Pocket integration — software that lets you save web articles to read later. Over the weekend, some Firefox users began to voice their displeasure over the move on public forums like Bugzilla, Google Groups, and Hacker News. The complaints center around Pocket being a proprietary third-party service, which already exists as an add-on, and is not a required component for a browser. Integrating Pocket directly into Firefox means it cannot be removed, only disabled. In response, Mozilla has released a statement saying users like the integration and the integration code is open source.
... telling the users what they like. Well done.
Ship that by default if you dare!
Obligatory why is all this shit built into Firefox comment here. I don't even want the developer console, on some machines. It's just an annoyance when I accidentally pop it up. Why should I have features that bloat the install if I'm not using them? Make them all extensions. Wasn't that the point of the design? That it's a platform?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Initially thought it was a new mozilla-run service, but when i clicked through to learn more, it was clear that it was a 3rd-party proprietary service. That's when i removed the 'Pocket' icon from the toolbar: Hamburger --> Customize --> drag it down and out. Kind of annoying that the plugin code bloat remains, but guess that's just something I'll live with for now.
I've been a big user and supporter of Firefox, even through all the performance problems, mis-steps, yahoo search shenanigans, but this is the first time I feel they blatantly went against their philosophy of an open web. Tsk tsk Mozilla.
This is why Firefox is losing market share. At one time, I could add whatever add-ons I felt was necessary to make Firefox look like what I wanted it to, and/or what I needed. However, for some time, Mozilla has been adopting a kitchen sink approach, where Firefox will have everything, and instead of being a lean browser, will be as bloated as IE.
If you do not like what the Mozilla Foundation is doing with Firefox, and they don't seem to care what you think - join the millions of us who've already switched to a different browser.
I was a loyal Firefox user for many years, but somewhere along the way Mozilla lost its focus. The things I used to need Firefox for (DOM Inspector, JavaScript debugging, Ad Block) are readily available with other browsers. So I bid adieu to their political agendas and bloated infrastructure (seriously - how much money do you need to develop a web browser?) and moved on.
#DeleteChrome
... Mozilla has released a statement saying users like the integration...
Maybe Mozilla should stop telling users what they want, and start giving users what they want.
Which is all good and fine from a technical standpoint. But look at the status bar fiasco. What was their response to that again? Oh, right, it can be brought back via a plugin. So do they want to move features into plugins or integrate plugins into the core code? Which is it, guys?
It's either blatant hypocrisy or there's some serious cognative dissonance going on inside Mozilla. Yeah, they're probably doing this to make money, but this one move simply invalidates all of their prior excuses for removing features people like and use.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Pocket should not be built in to Firefox as it is yet another third party that gets to capture your browser usage. Good old bookmarks have the same function without involving some unknown third party. I do not want the Pocket feature taking up resources on my computer! Leave it as an addon for folks that can't figure out how to use bookmarks.
Yeah, political affiliation has EVERYTHING to do with a web browser. Must be those damned socialists and their damned feelings. How dare someone have empathy for humans?! anyway, what were we talking about? Oh right Firefox! THANKS OBAMA.
And here it is, the reality of popular open source software. People bitch just as much about it as they do proprietary software.
"You can change the source, you have the power!" Yeah, not so much... nobody is really going to do anything except complain. (Well, except that one guy who is now going to make it his life work to fork it into something he calls Freefox that gets used by around 53 people... but those 53 people are very happy about it.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
It's not like bookmarks or Save Page functionality hasn't existed for more than a decade.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The difference is, it gets saved in the cloud, and your data can be sold to third parties.
Chome = Spyware
Firefox = Bloat
I'd rather deal with bloat than spyware.
Please no! Just yesterday I told a client, who uses IE, to go to a URL. They tried it and got a Bing search result. First I thought they used the search bar. But no, it turned out they mistyped something in the address bar, and so it decided "that wasn't a valid URL" and it ran a search instead. It would have been better if it said "server not found" or "hey, you can't have spaces in URLs" or "you forgot the colon after https." But since the default behavior is to run a search, it replaced what they typed with "http://bing.com/search?q=...." so they couldn't read it back to me to fix the problem. Ugh.
But open source is supposed to be about what the users want
Since when? Seems to me open source is primarily about what the developers want, and if the 'user' happens to have developer skills he can make it what he wants. Which open source projects are the ones that do what the users (vs developers) want?
The malformed URL would've resulted in an error otherwise, with more or less the same result.
Yes, it would have resulted in an error, which is exactly what I needed. It was not "more or less the same result." It was a completely different result that obfuscated the actual problem. When they got the Bing page, I first had to determine if they typed it into the correct box. Then, I had to determine what they typed in and what was wrong with it. But since it erased what I typed, the user couldn't read back to me what they typed.
There is a compromise: If it gave them the Bing search result, but didn't change what they entered into the URL bar, and/or echoed back what they typed in, then I would not have lost valuable information.
I had to include the scheme in this case, and I couldn't mail them the URL because it was the URL to get to their mail. :-) Worse yet, it had a port number.
Adblock plus: 20 million users
Video downloadhelper: 5 million users
Firebug: 2 million users
A slight segue:
You do an indirect disservice by stopping the list at #3 when #5 is NoScript with 2.1M users -- proof that people who disable javascript are not out-of-touch aberrations. Web devs need to be more cognizant of this fact.
There is also a disservice as "Classic Theme Restorer" is on page two with 437,962 users. Therefore, more people are going out of of their way to restore the old look of Firefox than are using the "pocket" service. Don't see any effort to take care of those users who like the old UI either; other than the "fuck off or use an extension."