[CorpusCalcium]

It strikes me as intriguing that people think there was ever a "severe backlash" over Pocket, let alone that it was what would have caused Mozilla to buy Pocket. Why would they not have bought it right away if that was the case? For that matter, why would they have bought it at all?

I fear you're vastly overestimating the effects a few people had on Mozilla's decision to experiment with, then buy a company that could help them potentially gain some actual influence over content-makers and the ad industry, and hopefully reduce their utter reliance on Google's money.

At best, the only thing the criticism over Pocket accomplished was to hasten Mozilla's pre-existing desire to develop these kinds of features as (what became) Test Pilot extensions.