wow, if there really was no money involved, this has to be the dumbest PR decision they've made

I agree, and if it wasn't for money then it's possible that someone at Pocket has a friend at Mozilla who pushed the integration of their business.

IIRC Pocket (then called Read It Later) won a Mozilla add-on design competition, the guy won a MacBook and then went on to build a company out of it.

Edit: Checking more closely, something like that: http://getpocket.com/blog/2009/08/reading-it-later-two-years...

So it does sound likely that Pocket was well known.

This. I really hope there was money included, because that's the only reason to do this integration that I understand and somehow accept.

There is this odd concept that things might actually be useful to people called "users".

I think the integration is useful, and I've used it quite a bit. It's a lot better (faster, more reliable) than pocket's old extension.

Walled garden "ecosystems" can be also useful to people called "users". There are plenty of ways they can give up their privacy to gain some convenience.

Do we really want Mozilla to go that way though?