And as a long-time user of Firefox, this is what got me to stop using Firefox.
There's been tons of people asking for the removal of Pocket from Firefox including hundreds of posts in the Mozilla governance forum asking for its removal but Mozilla sits there doing nothing claiming "sane privacy" and "oh you can disable it by going to your about:config and finding this key and setting it to false". Package it as an uninstallable extension or get rid of it completely.
That's true. However, we have surveyed large swaths of our users and found that for all the people that dislike the Pocket integration, several times as many actively do like it. They're not you or me, but barring a significant sampling error, it means the dissenters are a vocal but small minority. Of course, both classes are overshadowed by the proportion of users who don't care one way or another.
> "oh you can disable it by going to your about:config and finding this key and setting it to false"
That's false. From day one, you could disable Pocket entirely by right clicking on it and choosing "Remove from Toolbar" or by dragging it off the toolbar in the customization mode.
Instead of bundling it as baked in to Firefox why not just make it part of a "recommended extensions" section of the installer? Not only do you make the users that do use Pocket happy since it can be installed by default (just make us non-Pocket users uncheck the install extension(s) check box) but it gives users that don't want to use Pocket an option to not install it. And it gives developers a chance to vet extensions they feel may be good to add to Firefox to streamline the install experience such as suggesting password manager extensions like LastPass, Dashlane, or 1Password. Or any other highly useful extension (Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin).
It just seems to me the whole idea of making Firefox a convenient browser has become the kitchen sink approach to the problem rather than focusing on what is the essential web (supporting HTML, CSS, and JS standards). The rest is literally optional to use the web.
> However, we have surveyed large swaths of our users and found that for all the people that dislike the Pocket integration, several times as many actively do like it.
(Personally, I've disabled the Pocket Integration in about:config)
Mozilla employees and vouched volunteers can view the recording at https://air.mozilla.org/gregg-lind/.
I'm not overall impressed with browsers and websites these days (everything is slow) but Mozilla's still the best choice isn't it?
That is in fact the plan now, after the feedback Mozilla received on this:
> "Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on that could have been more easily removed entirely from the browser. We tend to agree with that, and fixing that for Pocket and any future partner integrations is one concrete piece of engineering work we need to get done." https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2015-July/003...