I’ve sat out of the discussion on Mozilla-Governance that has been ongoing over users disappointment with Pocket. I have seen other Mozillians dive in and defend the feature but I do not think this is helping at all. I read this post “Firefox, you’re supposed to be in my pocket, not the other way around” today and felt like it had many truths in it. I really do not know the rationale for adding Pocket as a default to Firefox but I assume there was some financial benefit for Mozilla involved.

The thing is the Pocket implementation is being lauded by Mozillians and MoCo as something that end users wanted but putting aside the discussions on Mozilla-Governance and the feedback from users on Input (Seems like the negative feedback is non-stop on Pocket). I’ll say that I have personally see a number of friends point out their distaste for this feature and it puts me in an awkward situation because I feel like defending Mozilla by default but rationally I cannot.

Who ever it was in management that gave the green light for this feature clearly is not listening to our users or didn’t get the right brief because I do not see a demand for Pocket in the browser. Can we start living the motto we like to use in marketing so much about how we serve our millions of users and not shareholders?

It seems like we are putting experiments and profit seeking features before our users instead of delivering on the features, performance and stability they truly want.  So can we please make the rest of 2015 a year where we do not drop any other controversial features in our users laps? Can we focus on getting Electrolysis right? U2F? Improved ESR Support (Chrome is winning the web in Enterprise and Academia)?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BenjaminKerensaDotComMozilla/~3/4sSkp4kCg1o/pocket-the-feature-nobody-wanted