Comment by xpe
5 days ago
The end of Pocket is just another sad example.
As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.
Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.
Even if you dislike Pocket, its purchase/deprecation is an example of Mozilla failing to effectively use its capital.
They integrated Pocket as a proprietary service in their open source product 2 years before Mozilla acquired it. Removing the integration required editing about:config. The complaints were mostly during that time.
Not strange, satisfied people don't usually run around declaring how perfectly OK everything is.
> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.
They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.
Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.
In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.
In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.
> Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party
That's a horribly dishonest explanation. The way that Pocket was integrated into the browser was obviously shady. Most clearly, there was no reason for it to be anything other than an extension. Mozilla earned most of the complaints that they were shoving Pocket down user's throats. The complaints weren't even primarily about "OSS purism"; Mozilla was simply being disrespectful to their users.
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That they're being bought by Google so that they can focus on the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.