I'm nervous about a Pocket news feed in Firefox. The idea sounds promising, but in practice Pocket's Discovery feature surfaces a kind of pseudo-personalized clickbait that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Here's some of the stories my Pocket Discovery feed found for me today:

"Why your brain hates other people"

"The most hated Bachelor in America explains himself"

"You're doing Scrum wrong and here's how to fix it"

"Fund managers warn a downturn is coming and it's going to be ugly"

"The dangers of belly fat"

It's lots of outrage & negativity, and I imagine it's because that's the kind of article people are actually reading & sharing, so that's what feeds the recommendation algorithms.

I don't mind if Pocket develops a personalized profile of my interests, but I'd like it to surface what I want to see. Right now YouTube does a better job of detecting my interest in music hardware & album production techniques than Pocket does.

I tried to use Pocket a while back. First it put me in an HN cluster where it would recommend all the articles posted on HN that I didn't save to Pocket because I wasn't interested.

Then I intentionally avoided saving articles from HN and just saved any decent blog posts related to programming. One of those must have mentioned Merkle trees or something because it started recommending "5 ways Bitcoin will make your farts smell better" etc. Then I gave up.

I think there might be a point where recommendation algorithms kind of 'overfit'/become a filter bubble. I remember reading a article about the youtube recommendation algorithm led to increasingly more radical videos until you end up on 'that weird side' of youtube (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...). Depends entirely on what metric you are trying to opimize, I guess. With youtube is probably something like "time spent on the site". If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv or something.

For some reason YouTube assumes I really like Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love and recommends it from almost every video I watch. A look at the comments suggests I'm not the only one this happens to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNITQR4Uso

Or maybe someone at YouTube just has great taste ;)

> If you want non-sensational content instead you should probably read papers on arxiv

I do the YouTube equivalent and watch mostly educational channels: minutephysics, numberphile, 60 symbols, cgp grey, 3 blue 1 brown, spacetime, veritasium, codyslab, physics girl, etc. computerphile for checking my layman's terms explanations of computer concepts.

> It's lots of outrage & negativity, and I imagine it's because that's the kind of article people are actually reading & sharing, so that's what feeds the recommendation algorithms

I would think a ML model could fairly accurately judge the level to which articles are written in an intentionally inflammatory way, I would like to see tech companies start to make a sincere effort to allow users set an adjustable filter on this "inflammatory-ranking" dimension of the content in their feed.

> pseudo-personalized clickbait that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

I'm not sure this is possible anymore. Even legitimately well written articles and sources now use clickbait titles to just be competitive. And you can't really blame them, they're just trying to stay in business using the systems people like us make. I'm really concerned that we're conditioning new generations to expect clickbait titles. It makes me wonder how long until this is just the norm for all titles. And the most abrasive thought, how long until we've reached a point where avoiding clickbait titles actively stunts your ability to get information and knowledge?

At this point, I've stopped worrying about the titles and just focus on the sources.

But even if it is tailored to your liking, you'll also suffer from a worse bubble than we all already suffer from.

These things do not belong in Firefox.

Firefox should be a standalone web browser that focuses on security, privacy, efficiency, and customization. Not Chome+Social Media 2.0.

I probably would have agreed with you in the past, but not anymore. Here's why:

I was having coffee with a friend today and he mentioned he was thinking about opening a facebook account – here's the kicker: the reason he wanted to get a FB account was the news feed; he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new.

I mentioned RSS; he was flabbergasted. He didn't know such a thing exists. I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

> he wanted to be able to subscribe to people's pages and get updates when they post something new.

Yes, but even this feature would be more like a traditional browser: A service-neutral, "dumb" feature where the user is directly in control. Not in an abstract marketing sense but literally: A user subscribes to a page and will get all events from tha page in predicatable order.

The "news feed" as implemented by Facebook and envisaged by Pocket is something completely different. You "subscribe" to pages alright. But this is simply a hint that gets fed into a curation algorithm. What you then see is a selected subset of events from your subscribed pages, in addition to "related" content and content the algorithm things you might find interesting. The algorithm used is of course constantly being changed and optimized towards a metric you probably don't even know. In short, with that kind of system, the user is very much not in control.

> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised. I'll be bold and assume that you can make money with curated feeds (or letting other people try out their curation algorithms on your userbase) but you can't make money with RSS.

You've explained where Facebook's likely interest lies, but not why that feature is actually popular.

I don't see any difference with how HN and Reddit attract people. They all seek the added social aspect to reading news; and Facebook is just what people know.

>Apologies for being cynical, but I'm not surprised.

Luckily cynicism doesn't equal realism. FF devs often make data-driven decisions, and none of the devs showed interest fixing all the accumulated bugs. So they left this to matter to add-ons, the big button was eventually stored away and the one in the address bar abandoned for Pocket. No sneaky marketing strategies involved.

Reddit and hn are quite different in the sense that HN actively (allegedly) attempts to fight against clickbait / mislabeled titles where resdit (in general) leaves that up to the subreddits to manage which (in general) do nothing.

Indeed, but it's the same concept, just different target groups.

What was the data-driven decision in that case? You mean they looked at plugin usage stats and realized Pocket had more usage than the built-in RSS feature?

>What was the data-driven decision in that case?

That based on telemetry data the RSS feature was barely used in general. I haven't seen any commentary that suggests any relation with their support for Pocket.

Is it surprising people don't use a feature they don't know exists? This is a catch-22 problem.

I would very much like to see a banner at the bottom of the new tab page introducing RSS and how it can be used, similarly to how Mozilla did for Firefox Sync.

On my version (60.0.2), I can click the hamburger menu on the right side of the address bar, click customize... and there's a "subscribe" button with the RSS logo that can be dropped onto the address bar or the overflow bar.

It's hidden away now, you have to open the "Page Info" window, available most-readily from the page's context menu, then go to the Feeds tab, select a feed and hit the subscribe button that appears, and it'll take you to the feed itself, where Fx shows its subscription interface (which you can get to directly if the page is helpful enough to provide its own link to the feed, as I think WordPress used to do by default in its meta links section back in the day).

However there's a distinct possibility said subscription interface will go away in future. (Whether or not the list of feeds in Page Info would go away at the same time is less clear)

> I came home and investigated – the option to "subscribe to page" when the page has an RSS feed is gone from Firefox, or at least I couldn't find it.

Actually it's a lot easy than others have said. It's just Bookmarks > Subscribe to This Page. If you don't have the menu bar enabled (I do), you can just press alt to see it.

I thought RSS feeds weren't available for Facebook entities (users/friends, pages, groups, etc)?

He reads people's blogs and he's interested to know when they post new stuff. The whole new FB account thing was his solution to the problem because those people also have FB accounts/pages and post there when they have a new blog post.

Why can't my web browser just browse the web? Why does it need to be a news feed as well?

I moved to the ESR branch specifically to get a web browser that just browses the web. (It's the default in Debian for that very reason!)

However, version 60 added pocket, along with other "features" such as the optional Firefox experiments (where, if you opt in, they track your user behavior to improve the browser).

Guess I'll be looking for a new browser again.

Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done.

Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience, that's why the ability to easily remove options you might not like will always exist. If/when this ever changes, that would be a significant departure from their Mission statement.

> Firefox is about letting you control your browser experience

The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox.

Further, when Mozilla first integrated it into Firefox, there was no way to remove it, only hide the icon:

> "This page http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/articles/1999137-h.... purports to tell you how to disable Pocket for Firefox, yet all it does is remove the button from the toolbar. Searching "pocket" in about:config reveals numerous preferences that can be edited, including browser.pocket.enabled which remains set to true after following Pocket's instructions."

Only after severe backlash [0] did Mozilla decide the best way to handle it was to purchase Pocket.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9667809

You can disable Pocket. Once disabled, there is no change in the browsing experience.

> The true history of Pocket suggests otherwise -- in 2015 Mozilla integrated Pocket, which was at that time a private company separate from Mozilla, into Firefox.

What in this true history you cite indicates otherwise?

Please elaborate on how some config settings are altering your browser experience.

It strikes me as intriguing that people think there was ever a "severe backlash" over Pocket, let alone that it was what would have caused Mozilla to buy Pocket. Why would they not have bought it right away if that was the case? For that matter, why would they have bought it at all?

I fear you're vastly overestimating the effects a few people had on Mozilla's decision to experiment with, then buy a company that could help them potentially gain some actual influence over content-makers and the ad industry, and hopefully reduce their utter reliance on Google's money.

At best, the only thing the criticism over Pocket accomplished was to hasten Mozilla's pre-existing desire to develop these kinds of features as (what became) Test Pilot extensions.

If people (and, organizations) are not allowed to learn from their mistakes Big Brother is an even more scary thing for our youth than it already is.

But they don't learn. They keep running head-first into these obvious blunders. Then they write a contrite sounding blog post, change nothing, and do it again a year later.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876016

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12441519

Yes, Mozilla made mistakes (I think you mentioned the biggest ones), but they also did things right. Every of these mistakes was solved. Firefox OS was solved as well; it got us Servo/Quantum. The question is do you forgive their mistakes, or what is your alternative? The most popular browser, Google Chrome, is still worse when it comes to privacy.

> Hover over pocket area on new tab, click the '...' in the top right, click "Remove Section", done.

Thanks, I never noticed the '...' menu. Now my new tabs are refreshingly empty. I just don't understand why a '...' was even necessary, all of the options would still have fit nicely when expanded to a horizontal bar. I blame whitespace-driven design.

It can. Just don't use Pocket or disable it.

But Mozilla are still pouring mental and financial resources into Pocket, including the servers to host it and power its recommendations. So just ignoring it still leaves a deleterious effect on Firefox overall.

They make money off of Pocket. Companies can pay to have their articles be in the pool of recommendable articles.

And it's especially also a different source of income than search engines. They try to differentiate here, in case for example Google's monopoly becomes even more extreme and they push the price down.

And exactly in this vein, a big motivation for Pocket is competing with search engines in general. It tries to be another channel through which users can discover new content, so that Google can't determine everything you believe in without any hindrance.

I'm really excited on what Mozilla is doing with Pocket and I hope it continues down that path. Currently my only gripe is that I cannot download the archived version of webpages I have and not easily make public link collections (atleast as far as I've seen), for which I currently use Shaarli...

Otherwise it's a cool product.

Here is my backup chain for articles I want to read later/archive against link rot: I run my own Wallabag instance (self-hosted pocket). Wallabag offers an rss feed for all new articles that triggers IFTTT to a) save a copy to pocket (just as backup) b) save a markdown version of the article to dropbox (via http://heckyesmarkdown.com/go/?read=1&preview=0&showframe=0&...)

Wallabag also offers automatic tagging rules and RSS feeds to each tag.

https://wallabag.org/en

People are overlooking how critical this technology could be for privacy, mass surveillance, and all its consequences: Personalization has been the selling point, albeit disingenuously, for the surveillance. It may be true that people won't use technologies which provide confidentiality if it means giving up personalization. A solution that does the personalization locally and with local data, thus preserving confidentiality, and which is open and free, could be pivotal.

The same was true with Firefox' customized home page ads of a few years ago. Everyone focused on 'advertising in Firefox', and overlooked the critical work they were doing: solving the problem of advertising, a seeming necessary evil, with confidentiality. In the uproar, the great value of that work was lost (IIRC).

I disabled everything from Pocket I possibly can when I downloaded and setup Firefox, in the `about:config`. That integration annoys me to no end. Who decided I needed pocket in my browser?

The belief most people have that Mozilla puts things in the browser they expect to be useful to users is mistaken and needs to die. They didn't decide you needed Pocket in your browser. They wanted Pocket in your browser, so that they could sell story spots (read: ads) to the highest bidder.

They discuss advertising in the browser chrome here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/04/30/a-privacy...

Note the PR-speak in that article. Advertising, by its very nature, cannot "provide value to users". If a publisher is paying to promote a story, it's because they want the story to capture more of users' attention than the users themselves want.

I agree but I didn’t want to say that as it seemed obvious (at least to me).

Mozilla, a non-profit, which produces primarily a browser with currently a small market share, needs to do something to bring in some revenue. Having Google as the default search at one time (and may still be) a revenue stream for them.

But on the last point about advertising. I disagree with your statement. In many cases, advertising allows consumers to know about services and goods they might otherwise not know about. This isn’t inherently bad. I believe the adtech way, though, is because it puts at harm a lot of people’s data for, often times, a very negligible benefit in reaching consumers.

> In many cases, advertising allows consumers to know about services and goods they might otherwise not know about.

I agree that advertising can help in that way, but I'm not sure how often that actually happens. The largest markets tend to be for products where everyone is generally aware that they exist (otherwise the market woulndn't be large) and most products are only differentiated by brand (e.g. fashion) instead of novel features. Because generic internet advertising follows the money, it ends up as a zero-sum game about moving market share between brands.

If there were a site that allowed only ads for completely novel products, or if the ad is just a link to a double-blinded study comparing along a measurable dimension against a competitor, I might subscribe voluntarily to be advertised to. Until then, HN comes close enough.

I will absolutely take the Pocket integration in Firefox over ad-banners any day of the week. I've used browsers with ad banners in the past, and this is infinitely better.

I see three links (on mobile) of actual content; articles or blogs with substance that I may or may not find interesting. They fall below the list of my most visited sites, and they're eminently missable. Depending on how I open Firefox I will not even see them due to bypassing the start page.

I've read several of those articles and found them interesting. It's value added to me, and I don't have to see ad banners for stupid crap in the bargain.

I don't see the problem.

I wish they would remove the feature. People who really want Pocket can install an extension.

They could even be adventurous and offer multiple downloads with different extension bundles. These would be easy to implement; because extension bundling already exists as "collections"[1]. Something like:

- Standard Firefox with our officially recommended extension. (use for the front-page/default download)

- Minimal Firefox without any extensions or other optional features. ("Try this on older/slower computers")

- Developer Starter Kit with a selection of extensions related to web development.

- Social Media Special with more extensions like Pocket plus quality-of-life features for people that spend z lot of time on Facebook/etc.

Having a variety of options is important, because there isn't a universal spaghetti sauce[2].

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

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauc...

Why is that better than the current situation, where people who really dislike pocket can disable the feature?

Nobody decided you needed it. That's why you have the option to disable it. It's possible that other people get value from it though.

I do the same, but it's not for us (who know about:config exists).

Every time Mozilla does something like this, or a promotion like the Mr. Robot thing, they remove a differentiator between Firefox and Chrome.

Mozilla is making it easier to think thoughts like this: If Firefox is just as bad as the other browsers, you might as well use the most popular one.

The most important differentiator will always remain that Firefox is free software and Chrome is the proprietary expression of the largest advertising company in the world. Anything else either of them does is peripheral to that.

IIRC Chromium is free software, even if it is a proprietary expression of something. There's only so much bs you can pull before people has you figured out. I still use Firefox, but it's been years since any news about it made me happy. Seriously considering now to compile Chromium myself and use it as my main browser.

Chromium is technically free software, yes, but it's a horrible example of it. Because Google entirely controls code contributions to it. Only a fork could be amended the way that the community wants it.

The same is obviously true for Firefox, with Mozilla being the gatekeeper, but this is where non-profit vs. for-profit does come back into play.

As for bad things in Chromium, as well as a fork that tries to fix it: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

As for news articles: When Mozilla does things, they're open about it, which is why news articles get written about their fuck-ups. And they're held to a much higher standard by journalists, as they are a non-profit.

When Google does something shitty on the other hand, people are quick to dismiss it as them needing to make money somehow. And there's lots of instances where Firefox goes the extra mile, where Chromium conveniently forgets about it and then no one blames them, because it is the extra mile, not the standard among browsers.

A prominent example is Chrome Sync. It's not end-to-end-encrypted and Google does state in their Privacy Policy that they use the browsing history submitted to them with Sync for other purposes. Your browsing history being stored on Google's server in decryptable form also means that NSA, CIA, FBI have access to it. You can make it end-to-end-encrypted, which however requires a second password and is therefore something that only users will do that really care about it. Basically, it's there to calm those that would complain otherwise. Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed.

And this is just the biggest and clearest example. We're talking about millions of lines of code with tens of thousands of design decisions. Google will have opted every time for the option that's not yet quite bad enough to gather bad press. Mozilla on the other hand has no reason not to protect users, if possible, even if it does not gather them good press.

So you say that the basic difference is the non-profit status of Mozilla, in a discusion about things that Mozilla does to make money. I'm not convinced.

Non-profit status doesn't mean that they refuse to take money, but that there are no stock holders. The organization as such is still interested in maximizing revenues and people working in it are not necessarily volunteers. How is decided who works for Mozilla and what's the direction it takes?

The fact that I said that I'm considering compiling Chromium doesn't mean that I trust Google. There's a top level comment that hits the nail in the head: we have been Mozilla users because we trusted Mozilla, even when it was technically inferior to competition. It they lose the differentiation factor...

There's the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit. More specifically, they are this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization

So, there's actual clear specifications of what they're allowed to do and what not. I don't know the exact ramifications either, but some important points are that they're not allowed to keep more than a set amount of money and that any money they get a hold of, which exceeds this amount of money, they have to invest into their specified mission (which in the case of Mozilla is to make the internet a healthier place: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/).

They are allowed to pay people appropriate wages, but as you've already pointed out, there's no stock holders. No one gets paid out extra money when they make extra profit. They are legally bound to reinvest this money into their mission.

And there's also the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation is not legally a non-profit. So, they don't get tax exemptions, but can keep around as much money as they want. So, in a way, they can make a profit, which is by increasing the amount of money they keep in their bank account.

However, they are a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. So, the Mozilla Foundation is their only stock holder. If they do make extra profit, they either have to reinvest it right away, put it on their bank account to reinvest later, or they can pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in non-profit hands, and is therefore legally enforced to be reinvested into Mozilla's stated mission. In other words, it's not possible for the Corporation to make profit which is not at some point reinvested.

The Corporation being a subsidiary also means that the Mozilla Foundation holds sovereignty over the Corporation. They can throw out Mitchell Baker (Executive Chairwoman) or Chris Beard (CEO) and set their wages.

So, the Corporation has motivation to make a profit, because the Foundation could throw out their key people, which in turn could throw out any slackers within the Corporation.

The Foundation also continues to hold the Firefox and Mozilla trademarks and has the final say of what's included into Firefox's source code.

That's what I thought. Not motivated by greed, but self-preservation.

Pocket seems fairly incompatible with Firefox - claims to be client side yet requires a login and does not work if cookies are disabled...

People do complain about FBs feed but they don't really care. If I were to ask you whether you'd like to sleep one more hour in the morning then you answering "yes" wouldn't imply that you don't get enough sleep. A technically better solution alone isn't convincing. They need a service that delights at least some people.

And so I think their chances would be higher (but still pretty low) if they were spending serious amounts of money on a campaign to promote RSS and a service similar to google reader. That way they'd at least get tech-savy people on board who would then act as evangelists for them.

Firefox needs to get in the game and throw chrome an elbow, i'm tired of google dominating every field.

Man, why can't we just use RSS as it was intended?

Because almost nobody non technical knows about it. Not even all developers know about it.

Well, that is, as a relative share, in absolute numbers it is still enough for services like inoreader to do fairly well.

I tried to switch back to Firefox, but my password manager (lastpass) doesn’t work correctly, I guess the new extension APIs are too restrictiy. So, Chrome it is.

Firefox's new extension API is Chrome's extension API + a few extra APIs. There's a handful of APIs that are actually Chrome/-ium specific, which made no sense porting to Firefox in the exact same way, but those should not be critical to the functioning of a password manager.

The only way in which Firefox is actually more restrictive with extensions, is in requiring user opt-in for internet connections that are not necessary for the functioning of the extension (so that's usually telemetry or ads).

But if LastPass refused to function because it can't send data back home that's not actually needed, and which it can't reasonably explain to users, or because it can't load third-party content from the internet, which would be a massive security hole, then I strongly advise using a different password manager.

Overall, though, this sounds to me like LastPass is just too incompetent to port their extension, which again should not be hard as Firefox's extension API is essentially a superset of Chrome's.

LastPass ran into some issues moving to the new WebExtension API last year, but it does support Firefox and is actively maintained. The most recent LastPass update was released just yesterday.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lastpass-pass...

That's Firefox fault? Bitwarden works perfectly fine with the latest FF.

If I want to use LastPass (or any other popular extension), and it does not work in a particular browser, I don't care whose fault that is -- I won't use that browser.

If Firefox is going to regain any of its former glory, it needs to be easy for people to switch to without making sacrifices.

It needs to be easy and clear for developers to port their extension. Ie. good documentation. Whether it is or not, I don't know.

It feels unfair if you blame only Mozilla for your issue though. It only seems to be that way because Mozilla changed something. But developers knew well in advance about this change.

If Photoshop doesn't work on the latest Windows version, do you blame Microsoft or Adobe? It'd depend on the nature of the issue but generally Microsoft allows developers to plan ahead.

Why did an extension like Bitwarden (a one man project) get their shit together while LastPass (with a big corp like LogMeIn behind it) not? If it were the other way around, I'd have understanding. Also, Bitwarden is open source, cheaper than LastPass (half the price if you want 2FA), you can even run the cloud backend locally if you prefer, and you can convert from LastPass (its only a CSV IIRC).

This comment on LastPass support forums sums it up: "I have had this submitted as a trouble ticket for almost a month now ... support simply sucks"

[1] https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=296945&star...

> If Photoshop doesn't work on the latest Windows version, do you blame Microsoft or Adobe? It'd depend on the nature of the issue but generally Microsoft allows developers to plan ahead.

A solution either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, blaming people doesn't solve anything.

For example, if I needed to use Photoshop for my job and it did not work on Windows, I would have to use a Mac. I would have to do this even if it was solely Adobe's fault that Photoshop did not work on Windows. Deciding who to blame would not solve my problem.

> Deciding who to blame would not solve my problem.

Well, you don't blame right away, you first try to solve the problem. If something doesn't work you contact a support dept. In this case you'd contact Adobe support since its their software. In Firefox example you'd contact LogMeIn since its their software. If Firefox explodes bunnies, you contact Mozilla but if your PC shoots lasers at bunnies you contact whoever you bought your PC from (e.g. Dell).

If there's a package on Debian which doesn't work who I contact the package maintainer or the software developer? If I buy a car radio and it doesn't work on my car, who do I call? If I buy a Raspberry Pi and Linux stops working on it, who do I call? If you buy a vacuum cleaner from brand X and it doesn't work anymore, you go to the store and they arrange it for you because the deal is with them. The answer who to contact -and ultimately blame if the problem isn't solved- is the company you do directly business with. You bought a product from LastPass and subscribed to it; you pay for that, get them to fix their shit that's what you're paying for. A working product. Simple.

Or, just do like I do, and switch from a product which got more than twice as expensive for zero benefit for the customer. Because if you don't switch you reward that shitty behavior.