Firefox is a niche product that appeals to the privacy-consciuos. Stuff like Pocket and Telefonica/Hello basically eliminates its reason for being.
I have Firefox as my main browser now, but I won't keep it around for long if I have to swat down new marketing integrations in every new release.
For Hello, I think Mozilla (but actually unsure who's servers?) is only involved in initial discovery and, if needed, WebRTC NAT traversal. In terms of code bloat, I think Hello is just a bit of extra javascript on top of functionality already built into the web platform.
But I admit I haven't look that much into it. I don't know how or if crypto is used. I haven't used the feature yet either and would want to know more before using it in a corporate or privacy sensitive situation.
I guess the same goes for Pocket, I probably don't need to worry about it if I'm not using it. However, for me personally, it just seems to be such a stark contrast with their position on Sync. On top of that, the browser UI is _mine_! Nobody - not even Mozilla - should be adding something to the primary interface of _my browser_ without a very good reason. And this is where I feel my trust has been betrayed for the first time.
Therefore it seems reasonable to add them to Firefox.
edit: I am talking about multiple gigs of memory for firefox and multiple gigs of memory in the kernel task allocated for who knows what. stop firefox and it lowers the kernel memory to a reasonable level and (obviously) removes the memory usage of firefox.
(And it's not like Firefox's performance has any low-hanging fruit left; there have been years of performance improvements already, and only someone versed in those would know how to take them further.)
Even if I could look at histotic data, the UI of about:memory is just plain awful. Charts anyone? My main question is how the consumption of memory for each tab is changing through time and I haven't found a nice way to see that yet.
Also, browser should protect me from pages which use too many resources. Why should some random page be able to stop my computer from working? I am seriously considering running firefox inside docker container just so I can limit its resources.
Note that I am a huge fan of ff and use it everywhere, but this has been a sore point for me for ages.
It seems that the tools to diagnose what has been the most criticized series of bugs in Firefox are still lacking. Ideally it should list the plugins used and the memory of each along with a way to identify the heavy pages etc.
Worst of all, there has been almost no communication on this. I subscribe to Planet Mozilla and read everything that seems interesting to me, and I still didn't know this was coming. There still hasn't been much public discussion on this. On top of that, they did a weird 38.0.5 release cycle that I haven't seen before with the release train. It was almost like someone said: "there is no way we can introduce this to enterprise with an ESR release, so lets tweak the whole release model so we can shove it in everyone else's face once we spin the ESR release."
I've been a huge Mozilla supporter since back in the Pheonix days. I'm even okay with their ad ambitions (so far) and think that they made the right pragmatic decision with regards to DRM support. However, with this move I've now felt it necessary to take a step back and seriously question their motives. It just seems so far out of character. I've been thinking and reading about this for the last 3 weeks and I still have no idea what they are thinking.
Edit: I'd also like to add that I'm a huge Firefox Sync fan. The fact that they took such a user focused approach to encrypting everything client side, and minimizing their server-side exposure to user data seemed like such a principled approach and is probably the only thing that kept me from taking the leap to Chrome at a time when there were noticeable performance benefits to doing so. This integration seems like the exact antithesis.