It took away credibility. A lot of it. It also alienated too many “almost evangelist” users (like me) who had converted countless users from other browsers in high school and college. Many of them haven’t been able to reconcile with what might seem a tiny change now. Also the jarring and bizarre way Mozilla pretty much stonewalled everyone on it who wanted it to be discussed.

I don’t know it would make sense to you, or most, but it felt like a breach of trust and seeing it is still baked into the browser itself (yes, they bought it; yes, you can turn it “off”) and that you can’t “completely remove” it, I don’t “that part” has changed. Besides the separate standalone add-on was a lot more useful and I was a full time user until that debacle when I moved to Safari (and Pinboard).

Purely from a feature development perspective, I guess I don't see how adding a read-it-later / bookmarking feature would generate so much consternation. Functionally its roughly equivalent to Reading List + Bookmarks on Safari, with some delicious-like aggregate smarts.

Would it have been better to have built it internally instead of through acquisition? I admit I'm unfamiliar with the inside baseball on it's integration, but breach of trust sounds pretty drastic. My read (as an uninformed outsider) is that they probably acquired Pocket for a song, it filled a gap in the product offering, and it offers the potential of a future optional revenue stream that aligns well with the web as a document reading medium (subscription).

There's all sorts of internal browser features you can't 'completely remove'. How is bookmarking different?

Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature that used Firefox Sync. They suddenly replaced it with Pocket, which sent users' bookmarks to a third party that engaged in data mining. (The acquisition came later.)

Users suspected money was involved. Mozilla employees insisted that Pocket hadn't paid for the integration. Months later, it came out that there was a referral deal.

Pocket was and is an extension. It just gets special treatment.

Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.

Thanks for the details. Sounds like it wasn't handled well.

> Pocket was and is an extension

Pocket is not an extension - it's built in by default and cannot be removed (only disabled).

It's just a bundled extension inside Firefox. You can't uninstall bundled extensions, and you can bundle yours in your custom Firefox installation if you want.

Did a similar thing for a project, rolled out customer's own Firefox extensions (for office workflow) to employee desktops. Extensions were bundled because the employers sometimes uninstall them and freak out because they can't work anymore.

How is your experience with Pinboard?

Not the parent, but it works well for me.

It took away Reading List, which was similar but private.

Oh that's a bummer. They should add that functionality back and bake it into same UX. FWIW Safari Reading Mode information is linked to your Apple ID so it's stored externally as well.

Pocket is owned by Mozilla, so it would be as private a reading list.

Reading List used client-side encryption. Also, Mozilla acquired Pocket more than a year later.