Mike Connor, I really appreciate your replies. > 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 understand that this was a pragmatic decision. And I get that Firefox needs to have great features in order to attract users. I see the conflict here: Firefox needs users to accomplish its goal, but its goal is to promote an open and non-proprietary web. It seems like the goal with this feature was to attract users, which it does at the expense of Firefox's "master goal." That master goal is inherently difficult, but that's why Mozilla exists. Overtaking IE6 was difficult; creating a new programming language is difficult; launching an HTML5 operating system is difficult; and as a software developer myself, I understand that creating a Pocket-like service is certainly also difficult. We are all hoping that this is a stop-gap to reach feature parity with other browsers until Mozilla implements a more, well, "Mozillian" solution. > For now, yes. I don't believe that to be the long term plan. Until > 1.0 Firefox only shipped with Google. The first version of the > Social API was Facebook only. Something has to go first, and > it's way easier to do that with a single partner for a v1. I am so glad to hear this. But I think this highlights what has been most frustrating for many of us here: the lack of communication. Where is the roadmap for v2? If a reading list feature is to be part of the core browser feature set, then let's make it a generic reading list feature that isn't Pocket-exclusive. If Pocket is the single provider for v1, what's the plan for allowing other providers? I didn't see any discussion about that before this feature landed. Now that we've all expressed our concern about this, let's start addressing it. To do that, we need better communication from Mozilla. I think it's time for an official mailing list thread and meta-bug. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
