Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web into a walled garden

Re:Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web i... by vord1080 on Sunday October 24, 2021 @06:12AM (#28976484)

Pocket isn't proprietary. The bundled extension is OSS and maintained in-tree. It's also not deeply integrated. You can turn it off or use artifact builds to create a custom Firefox with it completely gone, and nothing will break, because it's just a WebExtension.

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Re:Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web i... by grey_earthling on Sunday October 24, 2021 @08:15AM (#28977197)

The open source code is only useful when paired with a proprietary network service.

When Mozilla bought Pocket, there already existed a competing open source self-hostable network service, Wallabag. Pocket is to Wallabag as Twitter is to Mastodon.

My complaint was not that the code in Firefox was proprietary, but that it integrated with (and promoted) a proprietary network service, while there was a viable open source competitor.

At the time, Mozilla's mission included the aim “to promote choice and innovation on the internet”, which this integration seemed to go against.

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Re:Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web i... by TAForObvReasons on Sunday October 24, 2021 @06:20AM (#28976533)

The controversy at the time was that it didn't need to be embedded in the browser and it was a proprietary blob.

It literally took years to get to a point where the bundled parts were released as open source (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1343006 ). Obviously there are legal concerns etc, but many of the critics would have been much happier if the extension were released as open source first rather than adding proprietary code to the browser

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Re:Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web i... by vord1080 on Sunday October 24, 2021 @06:23AM (#28976545)

For what technical reason would it be a proprietary blob? The Firefox frontend has been html/xul/css/js forever. Pocket would be implemented the same. I can't see why it would need to be a binary.

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Re:Google had a plan called “Project NERA” to turn the web i... by dralley on Sunday October 24, 2021 @12:16PM (#28979289)

Pocket was an acquisition, not something they had written themselves.

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