Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> IMHO, Mozilla should absorb the Tor project

Tor has too many legal and ethical issues around it for Mozilla to take that kind of risk.

> And stop attacking the Linux distros for the Firefox trademark (forcing them to create the Iceweasel fork) or including proprietary services (e.g. Pocket) forcing the creation of the Icecat fork.

Debian made a bunch of changes to Firefox and was still calling it Firefox. Debian also objected to Firefox's trademark policy despite Debian's trademark policy for their own trademark being virtually identical. This happened years ago and years before Pocket even existed.

Pocket code in Firefox is open source, you can examine it yourself. And, due to lazy loading, it's never even called if you don't interact with it. You can right-click and remove the button and never worry about it again. Using Pocket was to add a much-requested feature to Firefox without Mozilla having to invest to development hours into building something that already existed.

I don't think Debian "objected". Mozilla's trademark rules are not compatible with the DFSG, therefore Debian can't distribute an officially branded Firefox. I do think the ideal thing would be for Mozilla to distribute Firefox packaged in such a fashion that the branding can easily be swapped out (in the same way that e.g. Redhat isolates its trademarked material to a couple of packages and documents exactly what you need to replace if you want to distribute your own modified version of Redhat) so that there would be no need for a full fork.

Two things:

1. It's true that the Debian didn't initiate the schism. Mike Connor (Mozilla) told the Debian folks to stop distributing branded builds that weren't QAd by Mozilla.

2. When doing a build, it has always been trivial to create an unbranded version. Unbranded versions are what you'd get by default. At this point, I haven't run a build in years, but it would be surprising if this weren't still the case.

I don't think it's the case anymore. They used to name the releases and then brand it based on the name. The releases are treated as inconsequential now.

> Pocket code in Firefox is open source, you can examine it yourself

You can see the client side code but what Pocket is doing with all the data on the server side is completely opaque and source is unavailable.

So is basically every single website you visit and all the data you share with them wittingly or unwittingly. Pocket isn't a password manager, it's a short scrapbook of things you want to read later.

Not every website I visit has its code integrated right into my open-source browser.

And you can build a pretty accurate profile of a user from analyzing the content people mark to "read later" (and how long they spend reading them).

You don't get access to the source of any site you're sending HTTP GET or POST requests (dynamic content) to with Firefox, yet you're complaining about client code for Pocket?

Not every website collects data. A pure HTML/CSS/JS site can be examined fully.

This only matters if you use Pocket.

This is no different from search integration. There's local code that lets you do Google/Yahoo/etc searches from the home page or the awesomebar. What these sites do with your data on the server side is unknown.

Firefox gives many choices for search integration. Perhaps something like that would have made Pocket more acceptable.

Exactly. If the problem was note-saving integration, they should have built an open interface for it, and then maybe (maybe) endorsed Pocket as the reference implementation, featured in the extension gallery or on the start screen.

Bundling Pocket outright, like Mozilla was just another Silicon Valley company, was very shortsighted.

Almost like you could install Pocket whenever you wanted to use it in your browser and remove it when you didn't want it, like you can with search engines?

Also, I would not particularly call those search engines a great comparison. They are simply keyworded bookmarks - you set the URL and when you enter a character or click the icon it loads the bookmark. The extent of integration was the search options menu where you can add any website's search field and it inherits the icon from that website, so its generic.

The fact that we are still talking about Pocket being integrated in 2016 amazes me. Especially considering that Mozilla was designed and intended as a community project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com