Chrome has google accounts to synchronise recently viewed pages across devices. This is just Mozilla's response. There is already a popular extension, so why re-invent the wheel?

Firefox already has sync built-in. I think this is supposed to be an improvement over the current bookmarks system. Mozilla realized that Pocket was already doing that better than they were, so they just integrated it instead of reinventing it poorly.

> I think this is supposed to be an improvement over the current bookmarks system.

The old secure Sync was great, absolutely great. I could see all of my bookmarks and history from all of my machines, and it was all well-secured. There was nothing wrong with it.

The main thing wrong with it was that most people couldn't figure out how to use it and hence didn't use it.

This is a common problem with well-secured things (see encrypted email, signed email), unfortunately, which has proven very difficult to solve.

Doesn't it still work the same way?

I see this as Mozilla basically admitting that the extension model has failed; this is a textbook example of an extension, but they've decided that's not good enough.

> There is already a popular extension

Exactly! There is already an extension, why isn't Pocket an extension then?

It is. I've been using it for years, they just decided to integrate it with the rest of the browser

That's my point. Why isn't it bundled with FF as an extension, instead of being integrated on the browser and effectively impossible to uninstall?

The Firefox team has been very aggressive about performance lately. Each extension you have installed increases the startup time, so that's probably why they baked it in.

So it improves the performance for a very small number of Firefox users at the expense of the performance of all of the other Firefox users who never would have had the extension installed in the first place?

If it is changed to an addon, it will still be installed by default. It will just be easier to remove. That means most users will take the performance hit because most people don't mess with the defaults.

What's wrong with Telefonica? I heard people complain about it when Hello came out and I never understood why because I'd never heard of it. Is Firefox still open source at this point?