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Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#131

Post by ossreality »

cpeterso wrote: post #46
firasd wrote: post #18

This trend of Firefox increasingly bundling more services and features is an interesting paradox considering that Firefox started as a quiet project to make a slimmed down, no frills browser in comparison to the main Mozilla browser. I’ve recently resumed using Firefox as my main browser partly driven by support of the project but also because Chrome was taking too much RAM and causing performance issues. Of course,…

Phoenix/Firefox was Mozilla's own lightweight alternative to SeaMonkey. Then Chrome was the lightweight alternative to a memory-hogging Firefox. Now Chrome is seen as sluggish and a memory hog. Where do we go next?

Chrome isn't sluggish or even that much of a memory hog. People see a large number of processes... and have been using Chrome for years with all of their shitty fucking extensions installed.... and then pretend to be surprised that it's slower.\

For FUCK's sake, it still takes over 7 seconds to cold launch Firefox.

That's Atom-editor level shit-ness.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#132

Post by cwyers »

yellowapple wrote: post #83
cwyers wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation only makes software easier to use if it is read. People don't read it.

By "documentation" I mean actually making the checkboxes better explained in their visible descriptions, or accompanying those descriptions with "a lot of websites rely on this box being checked" or somesuch. By no means am I calling for more things to be buried away in never-read manuals.

Won't read it:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062....

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#133

Post by hosay123 »

hrjet wrote: post #124
azakai wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason is to make them available to users. If they were in an addon, most users would never hear about it, and even if they did, many users don't know how to install addons. There is data showing that Firefox users like the feature and benefit from it. Given that, adding it to the browser makes sense.

By that logic, why not bundle all the popular addons with Firefox? Why only a chosen few?

Because they're looking for new revenue streams outside of the Google agreement, which stops paying out quite soon. It's a pretty slippery slope, but I don't mind the tradeoff they're making in this case.

Certainly beats them taking Adobe money (or cash equivalents) to bundle Flash, which is exactly what Chrome does (faster security updates blah blah yes I know, but a better extension update mechanism could work just as well)

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#134

Post by mook »

azakai wrote: post #113
xg15 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many resources perhaps, but a lot of additional UI surface, which clutters up the menus with irrelevant options.

I wouldn't say a lot, it's just one button. Is there a cost to adding even a button? Yes. But that has to be weighed against the benefit. And a significant amount of users benefit from having the button.

"Just one button" led to Netscape 6 and subsequently Firefox in the first place. It's easy to miss the significant amount of user benefit from not having that one button, since it's a smaller amount of benefit per person across a lager number of users.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#135

Post by mccr8 »

xg15 wrote: post #78
dblohm7 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello is just a thin wrapper around WebRTC. That's why Chrome can receive Hello calls without an extension. There's barely anything to add on in that case.

Not many resources perhaps, but a lot of additional UI surface, which clutters up the menus with irrelevant options.

Click on the hamburger. Click on "Customize". Drag the "Hello" icon off of the tool bar. It is now removed from the UI.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#136

Post by browser »

fabrice_d wrote: post #129
browser wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing cause and effect. Pocket was not added to Firefox because Firefox users demanded a sophisticated offline reader. If that were all there is to it, Pocket would be an addon. Pocket was added to Firefox because Mozilla wants the extra revenue from partnering with Pocket.

Pocket is not paying Mozilla, as said already. Also, anyone implementing a compatible backend can switch to it by changing a pref.

Can we get a public statement from Mozilla describing its deal with Pocket?

I see a comment below from a Mozilla employee stating that "there is limited public information available about this deal", and claiming that the best quote is in an article that contains a paraphrase from an email from another Mozilla employee saying that Pocket didn't pay for placement.

When a non-profit gives prominent placement to a for-profit company, there are many ways for money to change hands beyond straight up payment for placement. I think we are owed a clear explanation of the Mozilla-Pocket deal.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#137

Post by Manishearth »

zanny wrote: post #87
chimeracoder wrote: post #27

Since all of the comments on this page so far seem to be opposed to the integration: I love Firefox's "Reader View". It's the only way that some pages are readable on my desktop or mobile device, because so many websites try to hijack scrolling, insert modal overlays and ads, or do all sorts of things that make it unbelievably frustrating to just read static text . On the other hand, Reader View lacks a sync feature.…

Firefox Hello is not the integration of a proprietary 3rd party service. My problem with pocket is that I can trust Firefox Sync, because its code is open and if I were to doubt its security, I could audit it, either myself or contribute to an official audit. I can never do that to pocket. Its a black box to me, I have no idea what they are doing with my browsing history, and therefor I can never trust it. Its a huge…

Uh, no, Pocket's client side code is open.

The most you need to be worried about is Pocket reading the list of sites saved to your Pocket.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#138

Post by azakai »

mook wrote: post #134
azakai wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say a lot, it's just one button. Is there a cost to adding even a button? Yes. But that has to be weighed against the benefit. And a significant amount of users benefit from having the button.

"Just one button" led to Netscape 6 and subsequently Firefox in the first place. It's easy to miss the significant amount of user benefit from not having that one button, since it's a smaller amount of benefit per person across a lager number of users.

That's a fair point and I agree, there is benefit to not having more buttons on the UI. It's hard to know what the right tradeoff is, between the benefits of adding buttons and not adding them. There are good reasons to prefer both more and less.

In this case, data on user behavior indicated that it was worth adding the buttons. It's still possible that the data is imperfect somehow and a more optimal tradeoff could have been chosen. Still, I think there is good reason to believe the current data and decisions make sense.

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#139

Post by Manishearth »

Touche wrote: post #125
cpeterso wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw, browser.html is a Servo experiment with "future UI paradigms": https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html/

It says right on the page that it doesn't use Servo.

https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell does though

Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration

#140

Post by pdkl95 »

MisterWebz wrote: post #5

It is so unlike Mozilla to introduce something like that, I ran a virus scan and checked what programs had been installed recently -- I assumed it had been put there in the same way that IE users used to get the Ask Toolbar installed. Exactly how I felt. What the hell were they thinking? I'm generally very supportive of Mozilla, I even supported their initiative to put advertisements on Firefox's start page. But bund…

> Why not make it an official extension?

It says a lot about Mozilla when they decide to bundle fad features like these after spending years stripping existing features[1] out of Firefox. During their effort to dumb-down[2] Firefox, it was common to hear that removing those features didn't matter, as they should be provided by extensions instead. Apparently that cheap excuse is ignored when the feature when it is convenient to do so.

[1] the many options cut from the preferences dialog comes to mind - some that I have had to help a LOT of friends work around. Far too many man-weeks have been wasted ;_;

[2] which was a terrible idea that hurts the enthusiast that actually used those feature, hinders the inexperienced-but-interested users by hiding previously visible features behind the addons.mozilla.org, and doesn't do anything at all for the supposed target audience of non-technical users who by definition don't even use the preferences dialog.

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