[chimeracoder]

Since all of the comments on this page so far seem to be opposed to the integration:

I love Firefox's "Reader View". It's the only way that some pages are readable on my desktop or mobile device, because so many websites try to hijack scrolling, insert modal overlays and ads, or do all sorts of things that make it unbelievably frustrating to just read static text.

On the other hand, Reader View lacks a sync feature. There was one for a few days in Nightly, but it was buggy for the short time it existed, and it was removed.

I was hoping Firefox would improve the sync feature and bring it back eventually, but in all honesty, this is way better. The work that goes into making a seamless, syncing reader view is not trivial[0], and it makes more sense for Mozilla to focus on building a browser than to reinvent the wheel when Pocket already exists and works incredibly well with the same use case.

As for whether this should be "bundled" into the browser vs. an extension: I agree that it would be nicer philosophically if Pocket were a preinstalled extension. On the other hand, Firefox Hello is literally a preinstalled extension with no special integration or privileges (other than being preinstalled), and still some people made the same complaint about it when it launched[1]. So I take that complaint with a grain of salt.

And as for the performance impact of either, I'd have to see some data demonstrating that this actually leads to an appreciable (let alone measurable) increase in memory or CPU usage to be convinced that simply not using it is not an acceptable alternative.

[0] it may look that way, but there are a lot of corner cases

[1] From what I understand, Firefox Hello is simply an extension that leverages WebRTC features already built into the browser to enable video chat (with the assistance of a service provided by Telefonica, which assists in the routing).

[zanny]

Firefox Hello is not the integration of a proprietary 3rd party service.

My problem with pocket is that I can trust Firefox Sync, because its code is open and if I were to doubt its security, I could audit it, either myself or contribute to an official audit.

I can never do that to pocket. Its a black box to me, I have no idea what they are doing with my browsing history, and therefor I can never trust it.

Its a huge sin on Mozilla's part, a company who keeps promising privacy, to sell off some of our most personal data - browser sync data - to a third party proprietary web service.

[Manishearth]

Uh, no, Pocket's client side code is open.

The most you need to be worried about is Pocket reading the list of sites saved to your Pocket.

[nekopa]

Would Pocket be required to secretly turn over my reading list to law enforcement and not let me know? No warrant canaries on their site. I don't know how well a startup could fight the courts in this matter, as even the 'big boys' don't seem able to.

[rfk]

Mozilla could be just as easily compelled to turn over user data as Pocket, they're both US companies bound by US law.

[nekopa]

I know, that why I said that the big boys can't seem to fight it, but maybe Mozilla would try, whereas a startup would just get immediately rolled over by the justice department.

But couldn't an alternative be something encrypted which Mozilla has no access to?

[untitaker_]

>Firefox Hello is literally a preinstalled extension with no special integration or privileges

It is literally not, at least I don't see an entry in the addons or extensions menus on Firefox 38.0.5.

>and it makes more sense for Mozilla to focus on building a browser than to reinvent the wheel when Pocket already exists and works incredibly well with the same use case.

Now they coexist: Firefox for Android has a reading list that does not sync with anything while Pocket is a third-party service without the end-to-end encryption I've come to love from Firefox Sync.

[abrowne]

I don't mind using Pocket as the backend, but I want it to work more like Android's Reading List (and the reading list that was available briefly in desktop Nightly).

I want articles to

• be readable (and savable) offline;

• open in Firefox's Reader View, not Pocket's site;

• sync with Android Fx's Reading List, not (just) the Android Pocket app.

[GeorgeHahn]

Do you know what happened to the reading list that existed in Nightly for a while?

[abrowne]

A couple weeks ago I dug searched a bit through Bugzilla and the Mozilla wiki. My understanding is that it was cancelled while in progress in favor of Pocket. They also changed the Reading View styles to match Pocket's (the sepia style was better before, imo).

[chimeracoder]

I want all of those same things too. I imagine that this is just the first step to getting all of those things working, since doing basically any of that well requires sync working. Now that Pocket is providing the sync (which is the hardest part), the rest is much easier to implement.

[sp332]

The built-in Reader view is based on code from Readability http://readability.com/ If you install the actual Readability add-on, it has a "Read Later" feature. This addresses abrowne's first two bullet points.

[baby]

I can understand how some users are frustrated by that but here's my point of view:

I found this pocket thing to be pretty amazing and I never understood why browsers never integrated such a thing natively. I tried some other solutions before (I can't remember the names) and it never worked for me. They were either badly made or not well integrated in the browser. But this pocket thing. It's just seamless, I save pages here and I read them later on my phone in the subway. That's all I ever wanted from a browser.

Seriously, firefox+pocket+treestyletab is all I wanted.

Maybe integrate the new microsoft browser features where you can draw on a page to share that and that would be perfect.