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Mozilla Responds To Firefox User Backlash Over Pocket Integration

Posted by Soulskill on from the yelling-on-the-internet dept.

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.

13 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Oh mozilla by blueshift_1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Oh mozilla by luvirini · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Oh mozilla by ProzacPatient · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why not? It works for Apple.

      On a more serious note I've been a loyal Firefox user for the past 12 years however I'm getting rather upset with the direction it has taken the past couple years, however I don't want to use Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer or Edge (all of which are owned and maintained by large corporations) and since Opera has jumped on the WebKit bandwagon making it a glorified Chrome skin I'm thinking maybe it's time for a new open source browser. The only browser I can think of that isn't tied to some other browser is Konqueror but unfortunately I find KHTML to be somewhat awful and even if it wasn't Konqueror is *nix only.

      tl;dr: Mozilla has become detached from what made early Firefox versions great and it's probably time for them to be replaced.

    3. Re:Oh mozilla by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 5, Funny

      Perhaps it's time for a community-driven, open--source reboot that will focus on producing a lean, mean, standards-compliant browser without all the politics and bloat, but which is very flexible and user-configurable.

      Maybe we can call it, "Phoenix".

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    4. Re:Oh mozilla by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      So you've been stuck in the BIOS configuration screen for fifteen years?

    5. Re:Oh mozilla by geminidomino · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Adblock is even more popular by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ship that by default if you dare!

  3. Yet Firefox continues to lose marketshare... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... 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.

  4. Re:The statement by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pocket has been a popular Firefox add-on for a long time and...

    Let's see if they were right about that. Most popular extensions

    Adblock plus: 20 million users
    Video downloadhelper: 5 million users
    Firebug: 2 million users
    .
    .
    .
    Pocket: 257k users

    It is pretty popular. That puts it on Page 4 of the list.

  5. If mozilla cares about userbase by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They would do an ask slashdot about how they've been treating the browser lately.

  6. Re:I'm not sure I get this by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  7. How to disable pocket for the lazy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1.about: config
    2. Find browser.pocket.enabled preference and change its value to ‘false’.
    3. To remove Reader view, change reader.parse-on-load.enabled preference value to ‘false‘.
    4. Restart the browser to see the changes.

    -S

  8. Re:The statement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a feature that violates Mozilla's own Manifesto.

    This is not a core feature of a browser and as such it needs to be in a plugin. Even worse is that it relies on a proprietary solution that has a different privacy policy than FF. The company is VC funded and the PP states that "all your data are belong to us and also to whomever we sell out to".

    Is that acceptable in an open source browser?

    It is like they forgot what happened to Navigator when it tried to be a kitchen sink browser.

    It is the same reason no one uses Seamonkey.

    Stop trotting out strawmen and just admit you are a Mozilla shill, and a bad one at that.

    New features are fine, when they make sense.