&gt; so why was Pocket pushed so hard<p>Was it?<p>All I saw was it being integrated into Firefox, and there being a lot of backlash. Against that backlash, there were a couple of people pushing hard to justify it, but they were either independent or Mozilla employees (often from a different team) posting independent opinions. I don&#x27;t think Mozilla pushed Pocket a lot. Pushing features through the release cycle is pretty common.<p>Bear in mind that Mozilla integrated Pocket because it was the kind of feature it wanted to have in Sync (or Accounts, whatever it&#x27;s called), but decided to use a third party service instead of making their own. From that POV it&#x27;s much more reasonable. Not denying that it could have been done better with a pluggable open API and an open source equivalent (or whatever), but it&#x27;s not that bad from that lens.<p>Sponsored tiles was an experiment, IIRC. Mozilla wanted to see if non-annoying, easy-to-disable ads could be used to fill otherwise blank space. It seems to have failed. But I would guess that a lot of the devs were hopeful about this experiment. I (not a Mozilla employee, but I do contribute a lot) was, at least.