I have mixed feelings about this, and I think it's good to have this discussion. I was surprised at the announcement, because it seemed sudden and unexpected. Did I miss something, or was the discussion entirely internal to Mozilla (or on a bugzilla page, not something outsiders would typically discover on their own)?
I was also surprised because it is a proprietary service integrated into a Free Software product. There were blog posts talking about how "Save" needs to be integrated across products, devices, and the Internet. But "Save" was not integrated here--Pocket was, a proprietary service, a single web site. It seems to me that an outcome more in-line with Mozilla's stated mission would be to publish a save-for-later API, integrate it into Firefox Sync, and make it possible for Firefox users to point their browsers' built-in save-for-later list at third-party services that implement the API. It could even become a federated API, potentially integrating the variety of incompatible read-it-later-type services that exist. There are, after all, already Free Software implementations of Pocket-like services (e.g. Poche). It seems contrary to Mozilla's stated mission to tie in to a proprietary service instead of furthering the creation of open APIs and platforms. Imagine a certain web site or service released a new, JSON-based protocol that combined HTTP, HTML, AJAX, maybe XUL or XSLT-type stuff, and released a Firefox extension that let people access its site or services more quickly than using HTTP/HTML/AJAX. Now fast-forward a few years and it's very popular (maybe it's something like Netflix, and it lets them implement their UI more easily, or lock it down more than an HTML UI). Would Mozilla then integrate it directly into Firefox? It seems like the principle is the same. I write all this as a long-time Firefox user, and one who's used Pocket since early in its Read-It-Later incarnation. As much as I use it, it doesn't seem appropriate to integrate it directly into Firefox. And when viewed together with the EME situation, the trend toward integrating proprietary software and services is also concerning. It can always be rationalized with lines like, "Our users are going to use it, one way or another, so we might as well integrate it," but if that had been Mozilla's attitude from the beginning, I don't think we would be here using Firefox today. It seems like Mozilla is prioritizing users' short-term good over the long-term. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
