[morganvachon]

And yours is?

Most of the comments center around the same idea: Mozilla removed the choice of which "read later" service to use by default, by baking it into the browser itself instead of leaving it as an extension or add-on, where it and all the other services like it belong.

So, now if you have a user who doesn't want a "read later" service, they have to take the extra steps to disable the button and go into about:config to completely turn it off. For the users who do want a "read later" service but don't want to use Pocket, they now have whatever they install via extension, plus Pocket, which is redundant and silly.

Basically, all this integration has accomplished is bloating Firefox to serve the single digit percentage of past Pocket extension users (many of whom will continue to use the extension since that's what they are used to), and maybe grab a few hundred more who see the new Pocket icon and decide to keep using it after trying it out.

If they had gone with an open platform for this service, or even better, their own homegrown solution, I wouldn't be upset by it. As it stands, Firefox was supposed to be the open standard the other browsers should strive to imitate; instead, it is steadily spiraling downward. This is becoming a pattern, and it's not a pretty one.

[sp332]

So, now if you have a user who doesn't want a "read later" service, they have to take the extra steps to disable the button and go into about:config to completely turn it off.

Actually the user would do absolutely nothing, and presto, no read-later service. You have to create an account with Pocket before you even have the option of saving anything.

[eli]

Honest question: would it be better if instead they rolled out a custom Firefox-only Read Later service, as was the original plan?

Is the issue that they "picked a winner" or that Read Later shouldn't be built in to the browser, period?

[cscharenberg]

Neither of those is a good choice. The custom Firefox-only would be a waste of developer resources. Similarly, picking a winner is also a waste of developer resources: there were already extensions that had far more functionality. Firefox should have added a more general "Experience Enhancements" feature that suggested great features that could be enabled and offered a few options. This same concept of periodically offering enhancements to users could be presented periodically and offer any number of things over time.

My complaint is the Mozilla folks missed a more general, better capability they could have built.

[sp332]

Like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=fe... ?

[morganvachon]

I'm sure Mozilla did what they thought was best for themselves at the time.

For me personally, I would prefer most to see it separated from the browser, available as an extension only, so that there is better competition in the extension space, and so the users have the absolute most choice. Barring that, I would prefer to see Mozilla roll their own rather than, as you put it, "pick a winner".

Hard-coding a third party's product into your own is a bad idea; what if Pocket changes their terms of service to be even more user-hostile than it is now? What if they decide to start doing things the Mozilla Foundation can't stomach? Mozilla would then have to go through the same steps again to integrate a different third party, if they decided to keep the same paradigm in place. And I'm not just picking on Pocket, I would be saying the same thing with any proprietary third party service.