In 2015, things were getting bad for Mozilla. Usage was falling rapidly, as expenses were getting out of control. Scrambling to stay afloat and diversifying, Mozilla introduced Firefox Hello, for video calls. It also made a pact with a devil lesser than Google, which was not a competitor: the Pocket bookmarking service was also integrated. Probably anticipating the reaction, Mozilla tried to push through these subtly via a highly unusual "bugfix" release, 38.0.5.
Firefox 39 was therefore the first (major) Firefox version which felt like bloatware, featuring 2 superfluous icons in its default toolbar.
Firefox Hello joined Mozilla's rapidly growing graveyard quickly enough, lasting less than 2 years. But users had to pocket Pocket much longer.
During the initial backlash against Pocket, Mozilla responded by sweeping the issue under the carpet. It pretended the request to remove Pocket integration was invalid. After I asked to explain, it became clear Mozilla was willing to go as far as censoring criticism, and its infamous ":glob ✱" essentially disabled the ticket. But that request had obviously been doomed to fail from the start. Mozilla was eventually forced into going back to an extension, but still shipped by default, which did nothing to help the default toolbar.
Even when I formulated a compromise, Mozilla took it as an attack. Its equally infamous Mark Hammond pretended the issue was resolved and censored the ticket, again. From there, it was clear there was only option we had left: let it die by itself. Which took no less than 9 more years.
In May, in a blog post "cleverly"😒 titled "Investing in what moves the internet forward", Mozilla announced that Pocket was basically bankrupt and also moving to its now busy graveyard. So it's only yesterday, after 10 years, that the release of Firefox 140 finally ended that saga. Well, you'll have to look closely at the notes to notice it, but they did put it, in the otherwise empty "Changed" section🙄 Of course, after all that cash burned, there's not much left to compensate the poor users who did invest in Pocket; Mozilla will merely refund what was left from their annual subscription.
All of this is a pretty unfortunate way to announce that Firefox 140 is a nice release. If Mozilla had allowed unloading tabs a decade ago rather than integrating Pocket, perhaps it wouldn't have lost the vast majority of its market share during that time. But Firefox 140 is a significant step in the right direction. Here’s hoping Mozilla will take Cal Paterson’s analysis seriously starting from now.