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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

This bug report is not really clear. Does the submitter consider it bloat, or a privacy violation, or what? It should be obvious that the way it appears in Developer Edition (two releases ahead of "release") is not the way it will appear in the final version. This report should be about the way the feature is explained to the user, or about how hard it is to disable the feature, so that it can be improved.

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"Mozilla's recent integration with Pocket, a proprietary third-party service, is a mistake."

This seems perfectly clear. The obvious improvement is to remove it.

What is wrong with Mozilla at the moment?

I guess I'm just missing the point. The recommended action is to move Pocket to an extension that might even be shipped with the browser. I just don't see how it's different from "integrating" with the browser in that case. If the privacy implications were better explained and it was easier to disable, what would the problem be?

An extension can be removed completely. An integrated feature, even if disabled, still adds complexity to the running software.

> What is wrong with Mozilla at the moment?

I keep asking myself the same question. With so many releases of firefox I seem to have to spend my time searching for a way to remove or disable many of the features they push. I think the problem is this: browsers are quiet mature in terms of features, so now to innovate they need to force features that don't really belong in the browser. Either fix the pitiful state of bookmark management in your browser or let the add-on take the burden.

At least in my opinion, it's unnecessary bloat - just like that video chat thing they added a couple months ago.

Remember when Firefox, the lean, scrappy browser, first came out and ran circles around the bloated Netscape browser/HTML editor/IM client/mail client/newsreader? The Firefox team seems to have forgotten.

If anyone is maintaining a "Firefox: Browser Only Edition" fork, I'd love to know about it so I could use that instead.

icecat, follows gnu teachings

waterfox, pale moon, also exist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-bas...

I know for a fact that Pale Moon stripped all test suites from their fork of the code. Any modifications that they have made to the browser are not fully tested. Caveat emptor.

Neither Hello nor Pocket will add performance bloat AFAICT. Hello leverages existing web features (webrtc), and Pocket I just an API call.

With the customizable UI you can put these things out of sight too.

Firefox does have bloat, but these two are very minor compared to the bloaty bits.

This is not about bloat. Mozilla was already developing read-it-later functionality for Firefox. In fact it's already on mobile versions. Hello and Pocket have almost no overhead because they are just APi calls to external services. This is about Mozilla endorsing thrid-party proprietary services.

> It should be obvious that the way it appears in Developer Edition (two releases ahead of "release") is not the way it will appear in the final version

It appears that it looks that way in release as well. (Showed up in 38.0.5 on my Mac this morning, not in 38.0.1 on my Fedora desktop)

I do agree with the bug report, it's inclusion in the core product is a bug that should be removed. An extension is the right place to put this.

What's about Developer Edition? I have "regular" edition, and after the recent update it greeted me with a page about Pocket integration being built-in.

While I do use Pocket, I honestly don't like the direction Mozilla took.

It was mentioned in the middle of the bug report. I didn't realize the feature had shipped already.

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