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Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Mozilla. I am not a Mozilla employee. I also care very little about the Pocket situation.

Pocket was massively mishandled. You should have seen it coming from a mile away. And when you didn't and it happened anyway, you should have backtracked a lot faster and released a public statement.

And damn it, priorities. You talk about partnerships creating opportunities etc; you have plenty of opportunities already. How about Persona, for example? How come it got moved to community support and got sod all marketing behind it, despite being a technology the open web direly needs and Mozilla being one of the only entities that can pull it off? The tech is good, too! Where's that commitment to the open web now?

How many people were complaining about their bookmark management before Pocket was introduced? Was it ever an area of firefox that needed dire improvements? Not since sync was introduced.

You have nobody to blame but yourselves. Users are hostile to change by default, you have to be able to back up the change with solid reasoning, and you have to be able to sell it to anyone who doesn't actually read what you say. You should have known better; don't be surprised about the hostile reaction now.

[soapdog]

I agree with you on the Persona topic. I've heard that it was quite hard to maintain and it got no traction and thats why it was turned into a community project. Apparently the federation part was the hardest thing (federating identity servers and keeping trust and security is non-trivial).

As for priorities, you know that there are many teams each one focusing on a different task. Pocket is not bookmark management, it is a "read later"feature for those that want it.

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> As for priorities, you know that there are many teams each one focusing on a different task.

I am well aware. Like you said though, pocket was released internally because it was "easier". That should have never happened. It should never have left the aurora builds in that shape. This is a focus problem; you prioritized releasing Pocket in the state it was in, over... not doing that.

What else could the Pocket team have focused on? How about Firefox Hello? Part of why it is being received so poorly is because of how unpolished it is. And yet, it got released; and now it's giving a good idea a bad name.

I'll give you that hindsight is 20/20, but Mozilla is not fixing the situation. You guys should know when to backtrack, when to apologize (your users are angry at you!).

As for Persona, well yeah, it's hard. It's one of the hardest and most critical problems we have on the web. So is building a web browser, though. I don't remember Mozilla ever giving up "because it's hard", and I definitely don't remember Mozilla ever abandoning something because it didn't get enough traction. Did you turn into Square Enix[0]?

[0] http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-26-tomb-raider-has...