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A comment on Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox. Parent comment

Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by pdkl95 on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:46PM (#10680431)
Given how strongly Mozilla has pushed extensions in the past (traditionally core features pushed into extensions several times), what they should have done is simply offer Pocket as an "officially bundled" extension for the normal download. They could then trivially offer alternative downloads without the extension, making everybody happy.

This idea could even be pushed further: they could have several alternative downloads that are simply pre-bundled extensions. Alongside their normal version they could have "minimalist", "dev tools", "max privacy", "social/chat helpers", and the like. Most people would still download the normal version, but this might introduce more people to extensions, who would normally never even know about addons.mozilla.org.

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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by CaptSpify on Friday December 04, 2015 @08:51PM (#10680441)
I agree, but i had heard that certain components wouldnt work as an extension. That being said, they should have extended their api to make it work as an extension
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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by ecnahc515 on Friday December 04, 2015 @09:45PM (#10680571)
That's exactly why it came bundled as a non extension. So they could figure out how exactly they needed to extend the extensions API after having in built in a for a while.
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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by epoch1970 on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:28PM (#10680671)
They could have done such experimentation in an unreleased fork of the browser. Or if they needed wider testing, they could have released this separate, experimental branch and clearly labeled it so that people would know what they were getting into if they installed it. Mozilla didn't need to force Pocket on so many Firefox users who wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by sangnoir on Saturday December 05, 2015 @04:25AM (#10681379)
Why the rush to distribute it first and figure it out later? Couldn't they figure out the API extensions required during development, but before shipping?
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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by usrusr on Saturday December 05, 2015 @06:53AM (#10681635)
Pocket? What exactly is the integration doing that the addon wasn't able to do?

This is a real, non-rhetorical question: I started occasionally using the addon when pocket was still read-it-later and never changed usage patterns since.

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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by tomc1985 on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:14PM (#10680636)
Wasn't pocket original an extension?
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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by cpeterso on Friday December 04, 2015 @10:12PM (#10680632)
addons.mozilla.org has a "Collections" category where anyone can curate a list of add-ons. It would be good if an entire collection could be installed with one click instead of installing each add-on individually.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/

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