Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox

Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by cpeterso on Saturday December 05, 2015 @02:16PM (#10682920)

From what I remember, Pocket was "fast tracked" to the Firefox 38 Beta channel just a couple weeks before release. It did not ride the trains from Nightly to Aurora to Beta. This was controversial within Mozilla. We have the pre-release channels for good reasons.

The Pocket tracking bug was filed in April 2015 [1] but the feature shipped with Firefox 38.0.5 in June 2015, just two months later.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=pocket#c0

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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by mook on Saturday December 05, 2015 @03:22PM (#10683140)

Wasn't it fast tracked into the release channel? That is, 38.0.5 would have been a patch release on top of 38.0.4.

On the bright side, that has lead to a more serious look at shipping parts of the browser as first-party extensions. I'm very much looking forward to that, even if I end up leaving all of them on.

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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by cpeterso on Sunday December 06, 2015 @01:08AM (#10684539)

I see what you mean. 38.0.5 was a special marketing release to promote Pocket and new Hello features. You can see on Mozilla ftp server that the version numbers of the 38.0 patch releases jump from 38.0.1 to 38.0.5 (leaving room for any emergency patch releases of 38.0.1):

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

38.0 was released on 2015-05-12. 38.0.5 then sat in the Beta channel for two weeks of testing and then it was released on 2015-06-02:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Past_branch_d...

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Re:Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox by Manishearth on Sunday December 06, 2015 @12:27AM (#10684484)

TIL. Thanks for the info :)

I think I've seen this done for other features in the past, but yeah, this doesn't sit well with me.

(Still mostly okay with it though)

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