Purely from a feature development perspective, I guess I don't see how adding a read-it-later / bookmarking feature would generate so much consternation. Functionally its roughly equivalent to Reading List + Bookmarks on Safari, with some delicious-like aggregate smarts.
Would it have been better to have built it internally instead of through acquisition? I admit I'm unfamiliar with the inside baseball on it's integration, but breach of trust sounds pretty drastic. My read (as an uninformed outsider) is that they probably acquired Pocket for a song, it filled a gap in the product offering, and it offers the potential of a future optional revenue stream that aligns well with the web as a document reading medium (subscription).
There's all sorts of internal browser features you can't 'completely remove'. How is bookmarking different?
Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature that used Firefox Sync. They suddenly replaced it with Pocket, which sent users' bookmarks to a third party that engaged in data mining. (The acquisition came later.)
Users suspected money was involved. Mozilla employees insisted that Pocket hadn't paid for the integration. Months later, it came out that there was a referral deal.
Pocket was and is an extension. It just gets special treatment.
Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.
It's just a bundled extension inside Firefox. You can't uninstall bundled extensions, and you can bundle yours in your custom Firefox installation if you want.
Did a similar thing for a project, rolled out customer's own Firefox extensions (for office workflow) to employee desktops. Extensions were bundled because the employers sometimes uninstall them and freak out because they can't work anymore.
Would it have been better to have built it internally instead of through acquisition? I admit I'm unfamiliar with the inside baseball on it's integration, but breach of trust sounds pretty drastic. My read (as an uninformed outsider) is that they probably acquired Pocket for a song, it filled a gap in the product offering, and it offers the potential of a future optional revenue stream that aligns well with the web as a document reading medium (subscription).
There's all sorts of internal browser features you can't 'completely remove'. How is bookmarking different?