Mozilla did agree, following the criticism on Pocket, that shipping new things like Pocket should be done as addons, and would do the work to fix that.

Hmm, I posted a "Citation needed" and got downvoted, but I really would be interested to read if this is true. I kept up with the threads on the mailing list for a long time and never saw any such promise (there was talk about "future integrations" but nothing about changing their stance on Pocket, or anything concrete about genericizing the interface Pocket uses other than it would be nice at some point).

Most of those things also came with the caveat that the person posting was not involved, so if you have a link to someone authoritatively saying this, I'd like to read it.

edit: courtesy of zz1: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Go_Faster

Pocket is not only piece shoved down user's throats - just one of the most obvious ones. There are also at least Hello and Sync, and then lots of less noticeable stuff.

Citation needed.

Ah, an actual response. Much appreciated. That does seem to address the concerns and at first glance seems to me like a better solution than any of the ones I had seen proposed.

Apologies to Randall Munroe: http://www.controller.com/listingsdetail/aircraft-for-sale/C...

Reacting to backlash isn't an argument.

Why would you (or anyone) downvote me for criticising things like integrating a social API[0] into the browser?

If you feel like downvoting opinions you don't like, by all means go ahead, I'm just not sure if that's the way to have a meaningful discussion. Pocket never bothered me because, honestly, I never saw it. But yes I dislike it's integration. Still no reason to reduce this to the "Pocket indicent" I never realized was a thing until I've read about it.

I still use Firefox.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/So...

"Reacting to backlash," a.k.a. admitting they made a mistake and agreeing to roll it back, is normally exactly what you want people to do when you criticize them.

Otherwise, what's the point of the criticism? Just to make yourself feel good?

The problem is judging between an honest misstep and someone constantly pushing the boundaries to see where they can go without people yelling. A lot of it has to do with the difference between crossing the boundary in that particular case and crossing the boundary in general. To further complicate matters, much innovation results from crossing certain boundaries, meaning that pushing on the wrong boundaries may be the result of an incorrect direction for innovation, and thus resulting criticism may be directed not just at the misstep but as at the direction of innovation.

Wait, they make a pretty bad move, people complain (rightly so), they go back on said move in response to that feedback and "Reacting to backlash isn't an argument"? Or am I reading your point incorrectly?

The point is that Mozilla ignored their published principles ( 'The Manifesto' ), and also their stated testing and release processes, in order to shove Pocket out the door and into peoples' faces.

Basically they trampled on everything for which Mozilla stood.

In those circumstances merely reacting to backlash is insufficient. Heads should have rolled and assurances been given that they would alway uphold their principles regardless of 'brand benefit' or 'user acquisition'.

Was anyone demoted, reassigned or dismissed? No, just some PR lacquer slapped over the issue.

IIRC they were testing a new API, and didn't want add-on developers to start writing against said API until they'd finalised it, so they didn't expose it. Pocket was the test-case, and once they were done testing they'd expose the API and pocket would be easily removable.

Not that that changes the fact that pocket is stuck there right now, and we have no easy way to remove it.

> The point is that Mozilla ignored their published principles ( 'The Manifesto' ), and also their stated testing and release processes, in order to shove Pocket out the door and into peoples' faces.

> Basically they trampled on everything for which Mozilla stood.

What on Earth are you talking about? It's a few kB of code that provided a feature that users were asking for. If you don't want to use it, don't.

I didn't downvote you.

I agree that downvotes are not conducive to a discussion.

Sorry, I guess I was just frustrated, didn't mean to jump to conclusions. Leaving my original comment for reference.

Can you give some concrete examples?

> Why can't Mozilla ship their bloat

If you mean pocket/hello/etc, none of that actually loads unless you click the button. The only "bloat" is taking up a few extra kB of disk space and a few seconds of your time clearing out the toolbar. Yes, it was a mistake. Yes, they should be add-ons. But many users like and want the features, and it's a balancing act between the minimalists and the feature-users.

I fall on the minimalist side, and I removed those toolbar items immediately. But I'm not angry at Mozilla for trying to provide what many of their users said they wanted.