Why couldn't it have been a bundled extension? Heck, add the option to turn it on to the update page.
At the very least it would allow people to remove it easily and entirely.
Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
141–150 of 196 posts
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#142It 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…
They bundele it because they get payed for it. Same story with the new suggested site advertising. The alarming thing is that this way Mozilla is loosing it's independency.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really start to wonder what pot they are smoking over there at Mozilla. Standard things you would expect from a browser, like a way to easily disabling javascript are apparently left to third-party extensions, because oh you don't want to bloat the browser. But hey, video conferencing on the other hand is such an essential part of the browsing experience.
They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages, and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox wasn't working. http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/
Treat users like ignorant entitled idiots, and they'll just continue to act like ignorant entitled idiots. Meanwhile everyone else who does know what those settings are for suffers, and it decreases the chances of future users ever learning they could do that.
If users aren't putting in the effort to read warnings/error messages, or can't put two and two together and correlate why things aren't working on some sites with what they did with the settings (or even better, apply some more critical thinking and possibly Googling to figure out why), I think that's a sign of a deeper problem and trying to patch over it by dumbing down software interfaces is a horrible direction to take.
To become knowledgeable users of Web technologies and not mere consumers, they must be allowed to explore, experiment, and break, then fix things. Taking away these settings discourages that. "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
FYI Alex Limi no longer works at Mozilla.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#144It 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…
They bundele it because they get payed for it. Same story with the new suggested site advertising. The alarming thing is that this way Mozilla is loosing it's independency.
This is Mozilla gaining independency. When they were completely reliant on Google they had no independency.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#145I keep turning all that stuff off, and wonder if I missed anything. I don't want Firefox "social integration". I don't want "Pocket" in the browser. I don't want "Hello" snooping on my contact information. I don't want Yahoo (Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider. Someone may have to fork Firefox. It's still open source, more or less.
> I don't want Yahoo (Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider.
I don't want Google as the search provider, and you'll find many people who don't want Bing or DuckDuckGo as the search provider. That doesn't leave many options.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#146A remembrance of Zawinski's law seems apropos here.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#147I keep turning all that stuff off, and wonder if I missed anything. I don't want Firefox "social integration". I don't want "Pocket" in the browser. I don't want "Hello" snooping on my contact information. I don't want Yahoo (Yahoo? They just resell Bing) as the search provider. Someone may have to fork Firefox. It's still open source, more or less.
Hello snooping on your contact information? Where on earth did you get that idea from?
From the Mozilla web site. It's difficult to find, though.
Mozilla has a Firefox Hello Terms of Service:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox-hell...
which claims to link to the Firefox Hello privacy terms, but actually links to the main Mozilla privacy page:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/
which, in a sidebar, links to the Firefox Hello privacy policy:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-hello/
which links to the TokBox privacy policy:
https://tokbox.com/support/privacy-policy
which says:
"We use the information we collect from you in the following ways: ... To organize and carry out TokBox’s marketing or promotional operations/offers, contests, games and similar events."
One of Hello's basic functions, at least in its mobile forms, is to cross-reference your phone contacts and Facebook contacts. See "Review: “Hello” Facebook Dialer, Bye to Your Privacy?"[1]
So, yes, it snoops on your contact information.
[1] http://www.xda-developers.com/review-hello-facebook-dialer-b...
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really start to wonder what pot they are smoking over there at Mozilla. Standard things you would expect from a browser, like a way to easily disabling javascript are apparently left to third-party extensions, because oh you don't want to bloat the browser. But hey, video conferencing on the other hand is such an essential part of the browsing experience.
They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages, and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox wasn't working. http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/
What a terrible article. So they have a problem of users who are ignorant about the fancier features in a big app like Firefox. So instead of trying to fix that ignorance with education and a better UI, they punish the people that used to use those features while justify those actions with claims about how important it is to nerf the internet to protect these ignorant users.
Anybody that read my posts in the recent HN thread on building devices for safety (and the Therac-25 discussion) knows that I advocate strongly for spending the time and effort to make sure a design fails safely. It would indeed be a terrible design, for example, to provide a checkbox or radio button that let you disable important TLS/SSL security features. As a potentially serious safety risk, those features should be handled with great care. On the other hand, disabling javascript or image loading is not a safety risk; the worst that can happen to the user is they can't use some webpages. Removing the ability to disable those features isn't doing anything for the benefit of the user, it's Mozilla trying to avoid having to deal with tech support.
Some things in life need to be learned by experience, and by limiting the safer opportunities to lean about how the browser and the internet works, Mozilla is working to keep users ignorant when they should be doing everything they can to give their users the education they obviously need.
As for websites that break without javascript, this i just an excuse for lazy programming. Such sites should break, and Mozilla should loudly send any users complaining back to the websites that wrote broken, incomplete pages. This is yet another example where appeasement only hurts you in the long run.
http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-dependency-backlash-myth...
(there is a difference between reduced functionality (which is perfectly acceptable) and totally breaking)
// here come the down-votes; saying anything bad about javascript is easily one of the faster ways to draw down vote - probably because far too many HN reader's paycheck rely on the user not being able to disable javascript
// don't bother replying if you just want to assert that javascript is necessary, because i have multiple existence proofs to the contrary. This does require finding alternatives for a handful of broken sites. Such is the cost of safety.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#149What is the difference between using Pocket and a bookmark?
Indeed! I've asked this a couple of places and got no answer. If it is functionally equivalent to dragging the address to a bookmark-bar folder called Pocket I become very suspicious of motives.
Re: Firefox Bugzilla: Remove Pocket Integration
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages, and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox wasn't working. http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/
Treat users like ignorant entitled idiots, and they'll just continue to act like ignorant entitled idiots. Meanwhile everyone else who does know what those settings are for suffers, and it decreases the chances of future users ever learning they could do that. If users aren't putting in the effort to read warnings/error messages, or can't put two and two together and correlate why things aren't working on some sites…
Virtually no one outside the tech world thinks twice about javascript. They have other things to think about. They're still users of the product, and they will never start tweaking it, because their lives are already full of other things.