Despite vocal and repeated requests and complaints, Mozilla refuses to back down and remove things that users did not ask for and do not want; instead Mozilla does things like sneak Pocket support in in a point-release without any advance warning or any chance for the community to give feedback. And note that Pocket has had a fully functional Firefox extension ever since it was Read-It-Later--there was absolutely no technical reason to build in support for Pocket and deprecate the extension.
Mozilla has never been forthcoming about the real reason for doing this. In fact, the few Mozillians who have spoken about it seem to have had no idea why it happened, either.
Instead all we get is vague "people want to save things, this makes it easier for people to save things" statements. Well, people want to use Facebook, too: where is the built-in Facebook plugin? Where's the built-in Netflix extension? Amazon shopping support? etc. Clearly the decision to build in new Pocket code had nothing to do with a principled policy of making things easier for users.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Mozilla cut a deal and is getting money for it. And if that is the case, what is to stop them from doing the same for anything else? What if Microsoft cuts a deal to build in Bing support? etc.
