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.

Comments

Oh mozilla

[blueshift_1]

... telling the users what they like. Well done.

Re:Oh mozilla

[Archangel Michael]

Fact is that those who like it won't complain

... and those that know nothing about it also won't complain either.

The trend in software development is always towards bloat, cruft and kitchen sink. In the end, you have a program that does everything for everyone, that nobody really can use effectively. IT is a choice of providing 95% of what everyone needs, in a small easy to use package, or having 99.9999% of what everyone MIGHT need in a package that is too bloated to actually be usable.

How many times have you used Notepad/Wordpad instead of Word?

Re:Oh mozilla

[luvirini]

Unfortunately Mozilla has been doing this for quite a while.

It used to be that firefox was the most userfriendly and at the same time most extendable browser with fairly good stability and fairly high resource use.

Now it is a lot less userfriendly, though still as extendable with better stability than before and while the resource use has not really changed the other browsers have started using more and more resources so by relative position it is very good in resource use.

What makes me gringe with each major update of firefox is how it gets more and more annoying to use, that is you need to tweak, install extensions and disable more and more to get it closer to a usable browser.

Re:Oh mozilla

[nmb3000]

The trend in software development is always towards bloat, cruft and kitchen sink. In the end, you have a program that does everything for everyone, that nobody really can use effectively.

Which is the beauty of the Firefox addon system. The baseline browser as a framework is extensible in an almost unlimited fashion, which should allow them to keep the default web browser lean and focused on browsing the web. If someone wants add chat client or "read it later" functionality, users can choose to install that addon. Mozilla could even show a "suggested addons" page the first time a user runs Firefox that includes stuff like Pocket and the absurd Firefox Hello crap. For that matter, they could even bundle addons for things like Hello, making it easy for users to remove addons they have no interest in.

But no. Mozilla is filled with people hell-bent on destroying Firefox the web browser and and replacing it with Firefox the Platform. I'm just waiting for them to start decommissioning the addon framework, which they've already started by requiring all addons to be signed by Mozilla, or they won't be loaded. It's sickening.

Re:Oh mozilla

[geminidomino]

As much evidence as there is of this mass of "user feedback" asking them to integrate a shitty data-mining add-on into the browser core.

Adblock is even more popular

[NotInHere]

Ship that by default if you dare!

Sigh

[drinkypoo]

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?

Vote with your feet

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Yet Firefox continues to lose marketshare...

[QuietLagoon]

... 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.

This looks like another tracker.

[BitPit1]

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.

Re:I'm not sure I get this

[NotInHere]

The difference is, it gets saved in the cloud, and your data can be sold to third parties.

Re:Fuck you Mozilla

[bws111]

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?

Re:The statement

[MobyDisk]

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.