"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.