[pcx]

Everyone not happy with pocket recommendations, what is the alternate source of revenue? Not enough will pay for the product. On the other hand Mozilla has to compete with Apple, Google & Microsoft, all of whom are fighting hard for the Web.

Mozilla is doing good overall. They are doing some fundamental work to get back the technical edge, still trying to keep the future of the platform open with WebAssembly and their products have become much more reliable now. We have to cut them some slack.

[elkos]

I will be honest, I used to be a very active Pocket user as soon as it got bought by Mozilla, hoping that Mozilla would have open-source a significant part (in not all) the tech behind Pocket (so I could use my own install if wanted) and because the personalized recommendations it provided were very relevant to my interests.

Sadly, Pocket hasn't become open-source nor has it kept its awesome personalized recommendations.

[bzb3]

They could use the donations to improve Firefox, to pay the salaries of the engineers, instead of all the political nonsense they do with the foundation. Yes, your donations go towards that.

And they could cut the salaries of management instead of giving themselves raises.

Instead we got ads in the home page.

[pcx]

1. They are doing it with substantially less budget than their competitors.

2. Developers shouldn't have to build software for the greater good by sacrificing their livelihood.

3. I am pretty sure many people building all this amazing tech can definitely get paid better in other places

4. These days when someone like Facebook fails to be bold, I would prefer to support someone like Mozilla who walks the talk.

[bzb3]

I don't think you get what I said. I said: if they stopped throwing money down the drain with the politised foundation and the executives stopped raising their salaries they wouldn't have to run ads and maybe they could even pay their engineers more money.

[woodruffw]

Can you elaborate on the ways in which you feel the Mozilla Foundation is politicized? Their advocacy page[1] feels incredibly vanilla: it emphasizes private communication, online safety, and collaboration with generally well-regarded groups like the EFF.

[1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/

[brmgb]

> 2. Developers shouldn't have to build software for the greater good by sacrificing their livelihood.

No one is talking about the developers. Mitchell Baker received $2,458,350 in 2018. That's up from $1,035,114 in 2014.

Have you seen the incredible results which justified this tremendous raise? Personally, I haven't.

[nojito]

Are you ignoring the negotiation with led to a great financial deal with Google in 2017?

His raise is 100% justified...unless your implying that any software dev pulling in 150k would be able to negotiate a deal like that.

[brmgb]

First that's her. Then I am going to entirely ignore yoir pointless jab at developers. The discussion was strictly about Baker 150% raise.

The 2017 deal was a 8% increase in revenue. That's a significant slow down of the increase trajectory of these deals. Meanwhile every other metrics were going down, most notably market share.

2017 also saw the rebranding and the Pocket deal go through. I still don't think it was worth a 150% increase.

[zozbot234]

Working for openness on the Web is not "political nonsense". Without an open Web, there would be no Firefox.

[smnthermes]

See how Mozilla is fighting for an "open web": https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/youtube-regrets/

[jakemal]

Ads that, with a single click, you can hide forever.

[tarkin2]

I don't hate them because I like, trust and want to support Mozilla. I happily click on them.

I'd be happier if I knew how my data is being stored, however, since the recommendations seem to be well tailored to my interests.

[sfink]

This appears to be the description of exactly that: https://getpocket.com/privacy

I find it to be rather well-written for this sort of thing. As in, it was written with an intent to communicate what it's saying, which is the opposite of the usual.

[tarkin2]

It's rather long to be honest. But thanks for posting.

[als0]

It's one of the shortest professional privacy policies I've read.

[huhtenberg]

Hold on there for a second.

When Pocket was first introduced in Firefox, the official party line was that it was just something temporary donated by the good people of Pocket to plug a feature hole so that you, dear users, won't suffer much while we develop a proper replacement.

And now this has somehow transformed into a vitally important revenue stream?

[tandr]

Having a secondary revenue other than Google's donations is not a bad idea. Some of us actually like Pocket. My only wish for Pocket to handle links to PDFs

[plorkyeran]

They decided to buy Pocket instead. It's no longer a third-party thing.

[dtech]

I would very happily pay a couple of bucks a month (I already do through their donations) to get the "ad-free" version of Firefox.

Not sure if it can work for Firefox, but there are enough freemium apps on mobile which seem to make it work

[Wowfunhappy]

But you can do it for free by going into about:config and setting extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

[BubRoss]

Mozilla makes 10s of millions off of the default search bar.

[smnthermes]

WebAssembly is a security/privacy nightmare: https://www.virusbulletin.com/virusbulletin/2018/10/dark-sid...

[afiori]

by that you mean that it allows for obfuscation and performance?

It sounds quite meek if the worst attack just consumes more of my battery.