It seems that they will make Hello an add-on instead.

Which they should have done with Pocket as well. Yet it lives on, forcing those who don't want it to go through the steps to disable it. It can't be completely removed without gutting it from the codebase and rebuilding it yourself.

I'm not saying a clipping service like Pocket is bad, or a WebRTC service like Hello shouldn't exist, but it should never have been part of the base install. One of the greatest strengths of browsers like Firefox and Chrome is the ability to use plugins, yet Mozilla chose to forego that twice over.

Right-click -> remove from toolbar. Unless you count that as two "steps".

It's a little more complicated than that. Pocket is part of the application itself, not a plugin, and you have to go into about:config to fully disable it, else it will continue to have access to anything you type into the address bar.

http://www.howtogeek.com/228863/how-to-remove-firefox-hello-...

Do you have a source for that last part?

Common sense. One has to assume that Pocket will take the path of least resistance, seeking constant read access to the URL bar so it can perform a one-click save. It may be possible for them to come up with a way to get the URL without having read access, perhaps by having Firefox pass the URL only when asked for by Pocket, but I saw nothing like that in the Firefox code when this partnership was first announced. Granted, I haven't looked since, but why would they change it? And since Pocket's code is proprietary and closed, there's no way to audit what they do and how they do it.

So, one has to assume a lazy, insecure method on their part until they prove otherwise. Assuming benevolence and diligence from a company that is blatantly anti-open-source is foolish.

Unlike other add-ons you disable, Pocket will still always be in memory after you disable it. See `about:memory`.

It's not in my about:memory. Did you set up an account first before you disabled it? Does it go away if you log out and restart? Edit: 49.0a2 "Developer Edition" on Win10

That's the part I do not really get. It already is an addon, kind of. They introduced the concept of system addons, that are addons code wise, but can't be managed via the addon interface, and that is what Hello was already. This bugreport however seems to be about removing that system addon.

Maybe they want to transform it into a regular addon. But the bugreport does not mention it, and I saw no additional explication elsewhere.

That's much more reasonable.