On 9 June 2015 at 07:04, Dan Stillman <dstill...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The Pocket integration seems almost purposely designed to blur the > distinction between Mozilla and Pocket. (As Pocket's CEO put it, "With the > exception of search, it’s rare for companies to be integrated this deeply > into the browser." [1]) >
At least to some extent, that's true of any good integration of a third party service. It's certainly true for search as well. Painting something as foreign and possibly scary would be directly counter to the goal of helping users make use of a valuable feature/service. If we don't think it's something we can recommend/promote to our users, we simply shouldn't include it. Same goes for if we don't believe our users can or should trust a partner. > Safe Browsing is a slightly better parallel, but does Firefox actually > share browsing data for that? The documentation appears to claim that, at > least in most cases, Firefox downloads a list and compares URLs locally: > "No information about you or the sites you visit is communicated during > list updates." [2] (In any case, I think Safe Browsing more or less > qualifies as a search-engine-scale problem.) Where's the arbitrary line for "that's too big for Mozilla to do?" The reality is that Mozilla is still a relatively small company, and all of our major competitors have a couple of orders of magnitude more people and money to back their efforts. To compete with those companies we need to maximize leverage, and make pragmatic decisions on whether to buy/build/partner for each problem we want to solve. I know there are people out there who don't want to use any website >> whose code is closed source >> > > I think this is a red herring, or at least isn't even vaguely the issue > for me. A website's being open source doesn't have any bearing on its > having access to people's private data. Mozilla software is open source and > Mozilla is a widely trusted organization, but even Mozilla chose not to > collect people's private bookmark data when it designed its sync system. It's clearly not the issue if you're using Gmail, indeed! It's a tradeoff, and we believe that for the significant majority of users this is an acceptable one. In creating any feature, Mozilla has to choose between partnering to get >> it, or building it ourselves. And we can't build _everything_. >> > > Mozilla can't build everything, but it clearly can build bookmark-syncing > services, and it can build them in a way that protects people's privacy. To > roll out a very similar feature in prime toolbar space that treats that > same data in such a different manner from the existing functionality > strikes me as a bizarre and worrying choice. > The question to ask is not whether we can build it, but whether we can build it as well and as quickly, and what we would be giving up if we committed to competing with the existing services. Pocket's a market leader in this space, and focused entirely on this space. Playing catch-up, and investing enough in development to match their user value proposition (especially their mobile coverage) would be prohibitively expensive. -- Mike _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
