FireWire400@lemmy.world
on 22 May 17:22
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Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that… I’m sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I’d get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It’s actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I’m really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don’t have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
ToffeeIsForClosers@lemmy.world
on 23 May 02:40
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3Camels was, maybe still is, fully dependent on the Amazon affiliate program. A program that was reduced at one point, killed off 3Camels competitors, but not 3Camels. Then Amazon asked them to stop tracking during Covid for a time which they did.
This is around the time that I heard about Keepa which has a different model, not solely Amazon but other stores too, and not paid via affiliates program.
Also it’s just faster. 3Cs was getting super slow to notify. You’d get an email, click and surprise, that sale was over yesterday.
I probably heard about the controversy on Reddit at the time but there’s a chance I found this site here which covers some of my recollections.
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 23 May 00:51
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Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world
on 22 May 19:01
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I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
on 23 May 03:08
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They are probably scanning for the binary file executable.
They literally have control of and log every app that’s installed and will bug you until you uninstall it.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world
on 28 May 13:03
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Unless they’re doing app signing or binary examination, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
ToffeeIsForClosers@lemmy.world
on 23 May 00:57
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There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It’s the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it’s gone for good.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 22 May 21:54
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Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while “read later” services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
Didn’t some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.
state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
on 23 May 12:42
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I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven’t used Pocket once.
My wife is the Kobo user, so I don’t know what tools are available.
But seeing how there’s already a self-hosted sync service available, I’m sure it’s not impossible for Pocket (or something like it) to be developed in the open-source community.
Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
on 22 May 19:26
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Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
on 23 May 04:03
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Because I’m buying the $8 option from a company called “XYBENOZ”. Without reading the reviews I already know there’s a 56% chance of failure, but I’m willing to take that risk because then it’s Amazon’s problem.
I’ve also wondered about Fakespot’s accuracy. I just viewed it as one tool when doing online shopping. I’d prefer not to order crap in the first place than try to return something later.
I generally have already decided what to purchase before I load Amazon’s website. I also rarely purchase cheap white label products, and so Amazon’s reviews are mostly irrelevant to me. I’ve rarely needed to return items too and recently they were all my fault anyway, eg, not quite the dimensions I thought I needed.
I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there’s a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.
It’s a nice idea but when you think it about it’s actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.
Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways. Once again the obvious fake reviews can sometimes stand out. But the better ones a machine can’t tell any more than you can.
Your 2nd point doesn’t make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they’re bad and you know they’re bad. But what if they’re just bad enough?
Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don’t know the brands, I don’t know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It’s fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn’t die…
But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it’s too late to return. That’s (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.
I’ve never heard of anyone use a shop’s reviews to decide what product to purchase, so you’re literally the first to me.
If I want a product that I have no idea about then I’ll go to forums, YouTube channels, etc about that type of thing and see what they say about it all. They’ll be people who’ve done product reviews and comparisons. And so they’re the people with the knowledge and their the people that care.
So in your example of wanting a guitar pedal I’d be visiting music and electric guitar places on the internet to gather knowledge on the product range.
Once I hit the online store, I’ve already decided what I want to purchase. And so the store reviews are more about the seller themselves and whether the product is genuine/fake, or a good/bad version of the white label item.
I think it’s a good tool. I also think people and companies learned how to circumvent it and avoid being too obvious. And that was before AI! Plus, Firefox (who I didn’t even know owned it before today!) doesn’t want to invest time/money into it in a perpetual arms race…
pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it’s finally had the plug pulled
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 22 May 17:51
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It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.
Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world
on 22 May 18:57
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Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
Pocket is basically a chumbox, but it’s a pretty good chumbox.
toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world
on 22 May 17:54
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part of me thinks “great, those things were annoying”
another part of me thinks it’s a harbinger
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world
on 22 May 18:57
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I wouldn’t disagree that firefox is about to get enshittififed but I hope its not true.
CannedYeet@lemmy.world
on 22 May 17:59
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Noo! I loved Pocket. It’s integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that’s a tech company and they own Kobo.
Tim_Bisley@piefed.social
on 22 May 18:37
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I used it extensively on my Kobo as well. So nice to be browsing on my phone and see long articles to read and just save them to enjoy on a nice eink screen later when I have time.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world
on 22 May 20:32
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Similarly, I used p2k (Pocket to Kindle). My use case was to clip things with Pocket, which would then automatically send them to my Kindle, where I prefer reading longer articles and books. Retroactively, kind of my fault for being an earlier adopter of a locked-down device like the Kindle from a massive corporation and never moving on from it…
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
on 22 May 18:01
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I try to support Mozilla (and more obscure open source projects we take for granted) through donations and subscriptions. But I never used Pocket or Fakespot.
I don’t think it should be a forced payment but I’d pay a few bucks a month for a true developer edition. The current one is essentially just the early beta for extension developers but something really developer focused with no bullshit and developer tools at the forefront. I don’t know if that’s something other people would pay for but I feel like it’s easier to shell out cash when I’m using it for work. A lot of people could probably expense it.
It likely wouldn’t replace the Google money but it’d be a start.
buffaloseven@lemmy.ca
on 22 May 18:12
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Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
I’ll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.
It’s not just that it was useless to some people, it was a genuine security risk. OpenBSD’s port of Firefox has it disabled by default, and LibreWolf strips it out of the browser entirely.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 May 18:27
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“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”
This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance
- people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it’s a shame to see it go, it’s been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I’ve moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (wallabag.it for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I’ve still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
edit: this post isn’t a request for advice, I’m very happy with my current Wallabag setup.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 May 18:45
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Obsidian with the readitlater plugin is good, and actually stored in a standard format entirely on your devices, so truly offline.
TheBlackLounge@lemm.ee
on 22 May 19:13
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Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-reader sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
on 22 May 21:05
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what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
I have ended up using Zotero for this, which takes a snapshot of the webpage for offline reading (and preservation). Synced to other clients through my WebDAV server. Originally only used Zotero as a reference manager for academic journal papers, but liked using it more broadly.
aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee
on 22 May 20:15
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This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs
T o I
h f n
e t
t e
F h r
u e n
t e
u t
r
e
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
on 22 May 22:55
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Nice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things
The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub
on 23 May 02:33
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Serious question. Do people generally use vertical tabs? I work in IT and have seen countless people’s screens and browsers in all my years, and not one was using vertical tabs (though one put their start menu at the top).
acosmichippo@lemmy.world
on 23 May 07:20
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I use vertical tabs because horizontal tabs use more screen in wide aspect ratios (16:9 or greater) and I want to optimize my screen usage for the actual content, rather than the tabs.
dinckelman@lemmy.world
on 23 May 15:11
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I’ve switched my setup to vertical tabs (without groups), and I like it quite a lot. It was a bit of a shock to the muscle memory at first, but now I very much prefer this
Why don’t they just open it up to let people run their own Pocket services? The usual “proprietary code” excuses make no sense for an organization like Mozilla and it’s being end of lifed anyway. Just dump it on a repo somewhere and let people hack on it if they want to. Why isn’t this part of the sunsetting plan?
Fair enough, last I heard it wasn’t, and they certainly continue to talk like it isn’t. It feels like maybe the shutdown post might’ve been a good place to try to spread some awareness of this fact as it might be something people losing access to the service might be interested in.
i mean the main reason they don’t really advertise it as being self-hostable is the social aspect. the recommendation part doesn’t work if everyone is on their own instance. not that i know anyone that uses the recommendations. it looks like that’s the only thing they’ll keep running though…
Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.
This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.
sheogorath@lemmy.world
on 22 May 21:17
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I used to use it before it got acquired by Firefox to store my read it later list.
cley_faye@lemmy.world
on 22 May 19:58
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Shutting down two things that had no business being built in their browser, to replace them with more stuff that have no business being built in their browser.
Mozilla really embraced the “corporation must corporate” motto.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
on 22 May 21:13
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to replace them with more stuff that have no business being built in their browser.
what stuff do you mean? I mean, certainly not vertical tabs because they are useful, lots of firefox users like it. not me, but the world does not revolve around me, so…
I use Pocket since before Mozilla bought it. In combination with my kobo ereader, it changed the way I read the Internet for the better. Self hosting is no option for me and as far as I know Pocket was the best free read-it-later service. And the only one that worked seamless with Kobo. I really hope Rakuten buys it.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
on 22 May 21:02
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I really hope Rakuten buys it.
why do you think they won’t enshittify it? they own viber, see what they did there. ads all over the app, some in channels you can’t disable. once it asked me about the data collection I allow, I had to manually disable it with dozens of toggles for all their “business partners”, and it took at least half an hour.
blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world
on 22 May 21:36
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It’s significantly more accessible than trying to sync bookmarks with an Ereader’s shitty browser
JaymesRS@literature.cafe
on 22 May 21:50
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Can you pull up a bookmarked item to read when you don’t have an active network connection? If yes, that’s a “read it later” service. If no, then that’s why they are useful.
It also stripped the webpage to make it readable and mostly distraction-free, plus some services will also include tag suggestions to more easily find it later.
I used Pocket on my Kobo to read articles I saved, much easier to focus on the content and easy on the eyes with the eInk display.
turkalino@lemmy.yachts
on 22 May 20:45
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I never used Pocket itself, but I do like having the grid of news articles on the new tab page, which I believe is powered by Pocket in some shape or form. Anyone know if that feature is going away too?
It’s just a fancy history, it has nothing to do with pocket.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 22 May 21:46
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Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.
Wait, I didn’t know Mozilla actually owned Pocket, I thought they just had a partnership or something…
I used to main Pocket back in the days when I had an iPod Touch 4G and older iPhone models, nowadays… It is storing articles from those days that I bet I haven’t gotten to read 😂
Well, I guess I’m getting the opera or Vivaldi app, whatever that browser out of Europe is called. Or is it Brave or something, I forget.
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 May 23:04
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Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
To be fair, I think they both existed as separate products first, before Mozilla bought them. I used both, but they should have never been integrated as a part of a browser…
I hated it at first but then I started to leave pocket on and click links every now and then since I figured they got revenue out of it. I don’t use it often but its a shame to see it go now that I kind of like it.
I wanted to like pocket, but I never really understood the point of it when I was already using Reddit or Google News to curate what I liked to read about. Was it more privacy oriented?
I found that articles in pocket were actually well written and didn’t make you pull your hairs out
52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org
on 22 May 23:27
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Owning things like Pocket is fine as long as each product stands on it’s own. Melding them together is what upsets their user base.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub
on 22 May 23:42
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100%. And companies don’t seem to realize this. I’ll use fakespot, but there is absolutely no use for it to be an inbrowser app, and the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening. That said, I appreciate that service.
Pocket can stay or leave. I don’t care one way or the other. I never understood its usecase.
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
on 23 May 02:13
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the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this suggestion. IDK where I clicked “STFU” but I only ever remember seeing something about it once.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub
on 23 May 02:37
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I clear cookies often, so it could be a cookie setting, maybe.
I used to use it when I was browsing the web at work. If I was reading something at the end of the day, or if it was something I didn’t want to read at work, I’d give it a pocket bookmark. Then I could pull out my phone and finish right where I left off during my train commute.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub
on 23 May 23:12
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Huh. Ok, cool. I just go to the address bar and enter QR to it, which triggers some search engines to generate a qr code for the following text. I, then, scan that code to my phone, and open the page on it to read later.
I wanted to like pocket but the articles were such useless slop crap. I feel bad for writers who actually have a passion for the craft but end up sitting down and shitting out low quality popsci articles all day.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
on 22 May 23:33
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From the 404media article on the subject:
The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers.
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 22 May 23:35
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Everything good to halfway decent must die on the alter of cost cuts, but nevermind and never notice that they’re investing all of the savings on dubious junk like AI.
Madbrad200@sh.itjust.works
on 23 May 00:36
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As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
snekkysnake@sopuli.xyz
on 23 May 01:11
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Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it’s still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it’s pretty useful
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
on 23 May 02:10
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Never used pocket, how does this differ from just having a bookmarks folder called “stuff to read while you’re taking a shit”?
On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.
On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your “read later” storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.
I don’t save stuff with it but I read the articles that come up on desktop. so it’s kinda like a community, subreddit, rss feed, whatever
dantheclamman@lemmy.world
on 23 May 14:59
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Pocket saved an offline searchable archive of all of the article text. Multiple times I found articles I saved that were no longer online. So no, it’s not the same as bookmarks
I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 23 May 17:44
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They go to different locations. The ones from mobile are in “mobile bookmarks”.
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
a waste of space and time. always has been. but did moz listen? no. because fanboys like you mock the user and give them the confidence to do stupid shit. lame CEOs, failed TB, fxa servers…geez the list of absolute wrong directions moz went is so long.
praising freedom and a decentralized internet, but store links, passwords etc on their shit american servers.
the only good idea moz has was to start coding a browser…after that it just went downhill…according to the decline of users of the years. what is their market share today and why?
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
Multiplied by all the other annoyances you have to turn off, via either gui or about:config, each and every time. I feel you.
I hop machines fairly frequently, use multiple browsing profiles, and often create discardable profiles, so I eventually just went ahead and spent some time tracing all the about:config equivalents of the settings that I typically change every time and then put them in a user.js file that I can just drop into my profile directory.
…which is pretty smart.
but many of my installs unfortunately include osx and even still windows. not for me, but but for work and ppl that want alternatives. and i just dont have the time for these shenanigans every time. and as much as i hate it to say: a chrome install feels cleaner.
so for myself i rsync my ffprofile folder to a remote storage. but i will consider your method now. thanks.
My user.js file is entirely platform independent. I use it on Linux, Windows and even used it on my work provided Macbook. FYI: user.js only contains the settings you want to change, it’s not the whole prefs.js file. It’s just 63 lines.
I agree that chrome feels cleaner and needs a lot less fiddling to get right, but chrome is effectively dead for me. I switched to firefox for much more important reasons than a few UI annoyances.
JackbyDev@programming.dev
on 23 May 07:01
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Wasn’t it in about:config? Or maybe it used to be.
Yes, Microsoft is especially bad in this regard. For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending. They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen. And youtube premium, oh boy.
Not speaking of edge here, but the Microsoft fabric/power platform. They tried to sell me some feature for months and eventually i missclicked and started the trial. Now they are notifying that the trial ends in x days and they’ve been extending it so it never ends
Transtronaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 May 09:22
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In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features. If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in. Anything beyond that is inherently predatory.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification, so you can easily disable it the first time they become relevant. If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features
This is exactly how it works in things like Office or Edge.
If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in
Yup. Or unless a new feature is introduced, in which case a new pop-up appears. That’s precisely how it works.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification
Edge, most of the time, just opens a new tab with “Your Edge was updated” and a list of new things.
If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
If it was about the same feature that you already dismissed - yeah, I get the sentiment. If it’s about completely new things - it’s a really weird thing to say. How are users supposed to know that something new was introduced? Sift through thousands of lines of changelogs…?
Transtronaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 25 May 09:49
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If the user has indicated that they are not interested in new features, it means they do not care about new features. They don’t want to know about them, or they prefer to find out proactively in their own time. If you still insist on ramming notifications down their throat at that point, you’re not doing it for the user. You’re doing it for yourself.
But you can’t remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I’m glad it’s going.
Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 04:56
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Wish they’d make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores.
The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.
You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.
It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.
The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking “read more” as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that’s nor “too much space”. Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.
What you’re describing is so much more difficult from a technical standpoint than you give it credit.
Static pages – sure, the plague of single page applications – oof, that’s a challenge.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 06:01
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We can save entire operating systems in that way, the heavy burden is borne by the hardware, as far as the software is concerned it is to dump the memory snapshot of the engine into a file and reload it later.
I mean, it’s been almost 30 years and this aspect hasn’t evolved because of a long expired belief that we will be able to re-download it all later as if the internet wasn’t eventually going to churn over and all links will eventually break.
Ok, so your average site doesn’t download content directly. The initial load is just the framework required to fetch and render the content dynamically.
Short of just crawling the whole site, there is no real way to know what, when or why a thing is loaded into memory.
You can’t even be sure that some pages will stay the same after every single refresh.
Comparing it to saving the state of OS isn’t fair because the state is in one place. On the machine running the code. The difference here is that the state of the website is not in control of the browser and there’s no standard way to access it in a way that would allow what you’re describing.
Now, again, saving rendered HTML is trivial, but saving the whole state of a dynamic website require a full on web crawler and then not only loading saved pages and scripts, but also emulating the servers to fetch the data rendered.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 07:01
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I understand a VM isn’t the same since at least it is somewhat self-contained.
But at the end of the day, a browser does end up showing you something and has a stable state waiting for your input.
These stable moments are like checkpoints or snapshots that can be saved in place, the whole render engine state machine. And that can be saved at multiple times, similar to how internet archive takes periodic static snapshots of websites.
It should be trivial, a one-click action for the user to save the last couple of these checkpoint states to a format that can be consulted later and offline or after the website has gone. Whether that’s just saving “everything” it needs to recreate the machine state, or by saving only the machine state itself.
That doesn’t mean the whole website will remain interactive but it will at the very least preserve what was inside the scroll buffer of the browser
And that is a LOT better than just saving a broken link, or just saving a scrolling screenshot, which already would be an improvement over the current state of things.
It would also allow a text search of the page content of all bookmarked pages. Which would be huge since the current bookmark manager can barely search titles and very poorly at that.
The bookmarks system is long LONG due for a full overhaul
This “machine state” definition and manipulation is exactly the hard part of the concept. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a beast of a problem.
Our best current solutions are just dumb web crawler bots.
To me a simple page saving (ctrl+s) integration seems like a most realistic solution.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 19:08
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I mean the engine already has a full machine state. I could just run firefox inside a VM and snapshot the VM to save the website in a idle-disconnected state. So it’s a matter of doing something more sane and efficient than this
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 23 May 13:06
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It could crawl elements within the DOM to save a word cloud of visible text for each bookmark as metadata for later searches. I think it’s doable. Separating nonvisible and visible stuff is very difficult though.
This is supported, but not integrated in bookmark lookup. I mean, if you hit ctrl+s, the browser will save currently rendered HTML. No crawling required. Hooking up some text indexing for search seems perfectly doable.
I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. “Save Webpage” is useless nowadays because everything is loaded externally through scripts. What if it saved a timeline of requests and responses somehow and could play it back? This might require recording the entire JS state though… and so much more with browser APIs. Saving just the requests+responses as a cache would fail if the scripting was non-deterministic. Maybe it would make sense to literally save a “recording” of the HTML and CSS changes, playing back only the results of any network requests or JS?
This would be a whole new pipeline to make interactivity work. Emulating a server with cached responses would allow to reuse the JS part of websites and is easier to do. I have no doubt that some pages wouldn’t work and there would be a shitton of security considerations I can’t imagine.
Mozilla should fire their non-technical staff, strongly make the case for how they’re fighting for a free and open internet, and use a subscription model for Firefox to pay the bills
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 23 May 08:24
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Nobody is paying a subscription to use a browser they can get for free.
Enough internet users are familiar with the adage “if a product is free, you are the product”, through personal experience
I’d be OK with paying for Firefox if it meant that it was stripped of all association with advertisers. And presumably, if Mozilla were freed from that association, they’d be able to make a stronger case for how they’re protecting a free internet
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 24 May 08:00
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Maybe you would. The vast vast majority wouldn’t.
Not many people care about privacy from big tech, and those that do probably know what FOSS is and would know that they can trivially get Firefox for free.
I also doubt that Mozilla could get the hundreds of millions per year that they need to maintain a modern web browser engine, keep up to date on security, etc.
This story marks the loss of another revenue stream for Mozilla. Their business is increasingly reliant on Google’s search deal for money, and if that money stops, they’ll have to face that same reckoning. For example, they won’t be able to afford paying their CEO millions of dollars a year any more.
I think they should start repositioning themselves now as an activist organisation that is fighting corporate interests trying to control the internet. If they can do that, I think a lot of people would pay to use Firefox
Patreon and Wikipedia are things people pay for that they can get for free. I have long wanted a way to directly find Firefox development and sustainability.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 24 May 08:06
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Wikipedia has a far wider reach, doesn’t have competitors in quite the same way Mozilla does, and needs far less money than Mozilla.
It takes hundreds of millions every year to maintain a modern web engine, have top-tier security, etc. It’s harder than maintaining an OS, even.
I just don’t see enough people getting in on that.
You mention Patreon. Alright, let’s go with that. The largest Patreon project by far earns less than $3m per year. Mozilla would need probably 150x that.
The first paragraph is not true. Mozilla is backed by a billionaire or billionaires, for example Google and Microsoft where the majority of Mozilla revenues comes from them. Stop deceiving people!
funny. if you point out what sucks about moz before they tell it to their fanbase you’re banned. but after moz announced it everbody goes like yeah good decision.
the user/fan base has become the top reason to not use FF.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world
on 23 May 10:03
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i used pocket once, and after several steps to activate it, i realized that it was not at all what I thought it was going to be and never touched it again
kazerniel@lemmy.world
on 23 May 10:05
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fuck, I’m using the Pocket plugin a lot :[
not for bookmarking, just to mark where I was in longer videos and webcomics, 1 click on/off, easy
I hope they don’t remove Mozilla accounts too, I have all my bookmarks and sync between devices there. Zen browser that I use relies on this and I assume other browsers based off Firefox do too. Mozilla does not have a good managing team and they deserve to go down but there should be a transition period.
How can they sell your details if you don’t register for an account?
I’d personally much rather sync was done with no account. More like synching where clients connect directly to each other with a QR code (or cut&paste code)
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 13:45
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I’d prefer a self-hosted option. They could even do it the KeePass way where it just saves to a file and you’re responsible for syncing it.
I tried pocket a couple of times but couldn’t get past the “we think you’re on a phone so you’re only getting three items on the screen at once”. Well I’m not on a phone, I’m on a desktop with a 32" monitor and three T-Rex sized items on my screen is just terrible design.
ratzki@discuss.tchncs.de
on 23 May 10:40
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An recommendations for Pocket-Alternatives?
I save articles on my phone and desktop and read on my tablet…
SulaymanF@lemmy.world
on 23 May 12:29
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Instapaper is still going strong.
Apple also has Reading List built into safari and iPhone.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
on 23 May 13:59
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Wallabag and Karakeep are popular open source apps
Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I’m so tired of this bullshit.
Then anyone can make the improvements they want for it.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 23 May 11:31
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Good, I never used pocket and I never heard of the other thing.
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
on 23 May 12:45
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Welp, I’ve taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 May 13:08
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Good, they should exclusively focus on Firefox.
IhaveCrabs111@lemmy.world
on 23 May 13:24
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And how they can monetize user data?
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 13:41
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Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Wallabag has a paid public instance, but Readeck you'd have to host yourself until their public service launches later this year (see https://readeck.org/en/start)
Wallabag uses the Pocket API to transfer data (so I think you'd need to migrate before Pocket shuts down), whilst Readeck can import the file produced by a Pocket export.
Wallabag has phone apps, whilst Readeck is browser-only (does your e-reader support a browser?)
Readeck can export to ebook formats (so might be more useful for e-readers in this regard); not sure about Wallabag
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 23 May 14:08
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I liked the concept but immediately thought “this is gonna get dropped eventually and I’ll lose all the shit I saved”. Looks like I was right.
You can use firefox forks like librewolf or zen or something
There are other smaller browsers but there you have the tradeoff that they dont have as many devs
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
on 23 May 13:46
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The real Pocket is the Google money they made along the way.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
on 23 May 13:56
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The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it’s dead lol, I think I’ll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
on 23 May 14:49
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No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world
on 23 May 16:04
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I know what I need to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it!
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 May 14:02
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well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i’ve been wanting to for years.
Yeah I’ve been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I’ll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
MrMcGasion@lemmy.world
on 23 May 19:22
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Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.
Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don’t trust amazon’s own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
on 23 May 15:35
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Bummer. I can see pocket going, I tried to use it but it’s basically a place to put stuff that you plant to but never actually get around to reading, a bookmark does the same thing. Fakespot I’m not sure about. I’ve used it, but there’s no way to verify how right it is.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 May 16:57
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Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
on 23 May 17:35
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You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.
The point was to have stuff to read when no connection, such as airplane. Which browser doesn’t try to refresh the tab? Any setting that allows to cache to HDD on a mobile browser you know of?
It did that? That’s nifty. Maybe a little deliberate for me, personally, with my adhd, but I can see how that would be very useful. Kind’ve a bummer that’s gone, actually. Shoot. And there are no decent and trustworthy alternatives?
Opacity9850@lemmy.world
on 23 May 19:12
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Pocket goes hand in hand with procrastination.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz
on 25 May 05:34
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Fakespot was what finally convinced my wife to leave chrome. Fuck these fuckers.
threaded - newest
Good.
Pocket was actually useful. To sent web content to my e reader..
My Kobo has the Pocket app and I’ll miss being able to send articles to it. Apparently I’ll be one of the few to be sad to see Pocket go.
Somebody suggested Wallabag which can also be self-hosted and is available on Kobo.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
I found these instructions on how to install KoReader and use Wallabag. It looks like a real pain in the ass. I hope Rakuten does something, because I’m not doing that unless I absolutely have to.
You could consider sending feedback to kobo devs. They could make the install process simpler.
I just saw a thread about Digg buying Pocket from Mozilla, so I don’t think I’ll need to mess with that now.
There are dozens of us!
Pocket was always among the first things I disabled when setting up Firefox and apparently, I wasn’t the only one doing that… I’m sure it had its users but I always found normal bookmarks to be more convenient.
Never even heard of Fakespot, though.
Fakespot was kinda nice, whenever I looked at something on amazon I’d get a sidebar showing which reviews are real and summarizing them. It’s actually pretty useful. Definitely will not miss Pocket.
Is camel camel camel still useful for Amazon?
I’ve found it useful enough not too long ago, mostly for comparing Amazon’s pricing differences for identical products between various EU countries.
Never heard of this. Sounds useful, except I’m really only buying something from them because I need it quickly most of the time. I don’t have the convenience of waiting for price drops like I do with Steam games haha. Thanks for sharing!
Yes CamelCamelCamel is still useful. I check it every time before a major purchase.
Keepa is better, and depending on whether you’re conspiratorial, not compromised as 3Camels was accused of some years ago.
Compromised?
3Camels was, maybe still is, fully dependent on the Amazon affiliate program. A program that was reduced at one point, killed off 3Camels competitors, but not 3Camels. Then Amazon asked them to stop tracking during Covid for a time which they did.
This is around the time that I heard about Keepa which has a different model, not solely Amazon but other stores too, and not paid via affiliates program.
Also it’s just faster. 3Cs was getting super slow to notify. You’d get an email, click and surprise, that sale was over yesterday.
I probably heard about the controversy on Reddit at the time but there’s a chance I found this site here which covers some of my recollections.
Thanks!
didn’t fakespot only work in the USA?
Never tried it outside of the USA, couldn’t tell ya.
Fakespot became defeated years ago and became useless on Amazon.
The best method I’ve had is to ignore any off brand looking product that’s been for sale for less than a couple months, but has tons of reviews, and when I pick something, sort the reviews by newest first and read those ones.
Usually the most paid reviews and fake reviews are close to when a product first starts selling. If the thing has been for sale for a little while, odds are that the most recent reviews are mostly from real people. Also, sometimes they will sale a higher quality item the first few weeks it’s for sale, and then start selling the item with cheaper parts on the inside. Like earbuds with good innards getting swapped out for cheaper drivers and processors.
I’ve found a better way to use Amazon: not using it and fuck you, Bezos.
based
I use Fakespot but wasn’t aware it was a Mozilla product.
The bought it out. It was originally an extension.
still is as far as I know. I am using it.
Not for much longer
OMG I JUST started using Pocket because my work banned Firefox and made us all switch to Edge!!
Now how am I going to sync bookmarks and pages I want to read later on my personal devices??
I generate a QR code and scan it with my phone. Don’t sync work and personal devices.
If your work doesn’t care about your productivity then give them what they deserve for the tools they provide.
I’d be very tempted to install Firefox in my local appdata folders (which doesn’t require admin rights to install), then install a theme to make FF look like Edge with something like this..
Still use real Edge browser for work stuff, but FF for less-than-work stuff.
They are probably scanning for the binary file executable.
They literally have control of and log every app that’s installed and will bug you until you uninstall it.
Unless they’re doing app signing or binary examination, some of the methods to “log every app” literally look for an executable name. Renaming “firefox.exe” to “explorer.exe” (an obviously allowed executable name) and then executing it will still run Firefox.
There’s Instapaper and once upon a time they even gave you an email address to send links into. Maybe they still do that.
I forgot what it is called but there is an extension that syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium browsers.
Yeah, me too. I hate that useless Pocket icon in the toolbar. It’s the first thing I disable on every Firefox installation.
Glad it’s gone for good.
Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.
Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.
I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.
well they are terminating it for a reason.
i used to use pocket all the time back in the day. slowly realized there arent many articles worth saving for later let alone reading at all.
Bookmarks and services like Pocket are for different things. Bookmarks are for websites you come back to often. Pocket and other services like it are for saving links to stuff you want to remember and/or come back to once or a few times. Bookmarks are not made for having thousands of, while “read later” services are for saving anything and easily have hundreds, thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of things saved.
“Read once bookmark”. Problem solved.
.
Didn’t some articles have the pocket icon, and some were without? I remember trying it a number of years ago and being completely flummoxed by not being able to save things I wanted to read. Though it could have been user error.
I used to use Pocket a lot, it was my main way to read long form articles. I somehow stopped doing that years ago as a way to preserve my mental health. Since then I haven’t used Pocket once.
wallabag.org
Thx for this.
Also, shout-out to karakeep.app (formerly “Hoarder”)
Thank you! Guess I’ll be trying something new.
Thanks - added to Pocket to read it later.
Why doesn’t Mozilla change or add the MIT license to Pocket?
It’s a service. It doesn’t just run in the browser.
It SHOULD!
the main point of it afaik is access from other mechines, and different kinds of devices. how did you imagine it?
Something like RES maybe… supply your own storage?
You mean, perfect for self-hosting? 😀
good luck pointing your kobo to your self hosted instance.
My wife is the Kobo user, so I don’t know what tools are available.
But seeing how there’s already a self-hosted sync service available, I’m sure it’s not impossible for Pocket (or something like it) to be developed in the open-source community.
because it’s all Apache 2.0 or MPL
shame about pocket - wonder how much of a hole that really burned in their pocket - if much
Hey Op why was Microsoft Palestine thread removed?
I liked Fakespot. Amazon obviously doesn’t care whether reviews are legit.
Fakespot has always felt inaccurate to me. Once every 6 months or so I gave it a go to see if any of the updates have improved it but it never felt like it did to me.
Furthermore, I don’t see the point in Fakespot since Amazon bends over backwards to accept returns for any reason.
Why go through that hassle if you can avoid it in the first place?
Because I’m buying the $8 option from a company called “XYBENOZ”. Without reading the reviews I already know there’s a 56% chance of failure, but I’m willing to take that risk because then it’s Amazon’s problem.
I’ve also wondered about Fakespot’s accuracy. I just viewed it as one tool when doing online shopping. I’d prefer not to order crap in the first place than try to return something later.
I generally have already decided what to purchase before I load Amazon’s website. I also rarely purchase cheap white label products, and so Amazon’s reviews are mostly irrelevant to me. I’ve rarely needed to return items too and recently they were all my fault anyway, eg, not quite the dimensions I thought I needed.
I stopped trusting it much when I noticed there’s a huge difference between the same product on amazon.ca and amazon.com. On one domain it can give something an F grade while on the other domain it will have an A grade.
It’s a nice idea but when you think it about it’s actually kind of hard to determine the quality of a particular listing apart from the obvious checks you can do yourself. Like if the seller is some random drop shipper or actually Amazon or the manufacturer.
Judging reviews with whatever AI system they use is not very accurate anyways. Once again the obvious fake reviews can sometimes stand out. But the better ones a machine can’t tell any more than you can.
Your 2nd point doesn’t make any sense. Sure, you can spend the time returning things. If they’re bad and you know they’re bad. But what if they’re just bad enough?
Take guitar pedals, for example. I know nothing about guitar pedals. I don’t know the brands, I don’t know the features I should look for, what they should cost, nothing. A company can purchase thousands, tens of thousands, or more fake reviews from a bot farm run by wage slaves. I might buy their subpar pedal based on the good review score. It’s fine, it works well enough from my initial testing and doesn’t die…
But what I wanted was to purchase one of the better ones, which the false reviews told me it was! I could have spent the same or less for a better product, that rewarded the company that made the superior product. And I might not even know it, at least until it’s too late to return. That’s (one of) the problems with how bad fake reviews have gotten.
I’ve never heard of anyone use a shop’s reviews to decide what product to purchase, so you’re literally the first to me.
If I want a product that I have no idea about then I’ll go to forums, YouTube channels, etc about that type of thing and see what they say about it all. They’ll be people who’ve done product reviews and comparisons. And so they’re the people with the knowledge and their the people that care.
So in your example of wanting a guitar pedal I’d be visiting music and electric guitar places on the internet to gather knowledge on the product range.
Once I hit the online store, I’ve already decided what I want to purchase. And so the store reviews are more about the seller themselves and whether the product is genuine/fake, or a good/bad version of the white label item.
I think it’s a good tool. I also think people and companies learned how to circumvent it and avoid being too obvious. And that was before AI! Plus, Firefox (who I didn’t even know owned it before today!) doesn’t want to invest time/money into it in a perpetual arms race…
I’ve never known about it until just now, but I wish I had, because my mom definitely needs something like that. Quite a shame
Idiots. Buying a perfectly good service just to shut it down. I wonder if they even bothered looking for a buyer.
Also that new logo with the flag sucks.
pocket I never used. I found it ugly and just s violation of privacy as it moved a service that should be local only, to external webservers. I can see why it’s finally had the plug pulled
It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.
Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.
Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.
the main thing with pocket and services like it is that it saves and syncs entire pages. like a local internet archive.
Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.
Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.
Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…
Pocket is basically a chumbox, but it’s a pretty good chumbox.
part of me thinks “great, those things were annoying”
another part of me thinks it’s a harbinger
I wouldn’t disagree that firefox is about to get enshittififed but I hope its not true.
Noo! I loved Pocket. It’s integrated into my Kobo eReader. It was the only good way to get articles easily synced on to an eReader. I hope Kobo buys Pocket. Or Rakuten, since that’s a tech company and they own Kobo.
I used it extensively on my Kobo as well. So nice to be browsing on my phone and see long articles to read and just save them to enjoy on a nice eink screen later when I have time.
wallabag.org
Supposedly Wallabag works Kobo readers. Most people self host Wallabag but I think they do have a hosted option as well.
Similarly, I used p2k (Pocket to Kindle). My use case was to clip things with Pocket, which would then automatically send them to my Kindle, where I prefer reading longer articles and books. Retroactively, kind of my fault for being an earlier adopter of a locked-down device like the Kindle from a massive corporation and never moving on from it…
I try to support Mozilla (and more obscure open source projects we take for granted) through donations and subscriptions. But I never used Pocket or Fakespot.
I don’t think it should be a forced payment but I’d pay a few bucks a month for a true developer edition. The current one is essentially just the early beta for extension developers but something really developer focused with no bullshit and developer tools at the forefront. I don’t know if that’s something other people would pay for but I feel like it’s easier to shell out cash when I’m using it for work. A lot of people could probably expense it.
It likely wouldn’t replace the Google money but it’d be a start.
Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
If you use KoReader, you can use Wallabag for the same purpose.
I’ll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.
Finally! I couldn’t wait for Pocket to shut down. One useless icon less in my Firefox.
It’s not just that it was useless to some people, it was a genuine security risk. OpenBSD’s port of Firefox has it disabled by default, and LibreWolf strips it out of the browser entirely.
“Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire”
This is a misleading statement. 86% of Mozilla’s funding is from google. Modern web browsers are a fucked landscape designed to perpetuate googles dominance
bUt iT’S jUSt bOoKmARkS
- people who are privileged enough to never have experienced multiple days without an internet connection.
it’s a shame to see it go, it’s been the first read-it-later service that I was aware of and used. I’ve moved away to Omnivore (RIP) and then Wallabag (wallabag.it for 11€/year, but you can self-host it or find someone else to host it for you for a lower fee), but I’ve still been thinking fondly of it, despite Mozilla clearly trying to force people into social reading rather than just serve as a convenient offline storage of articles.
edit: this post isn’t a request for advice, I’m very happy with my current Wallabag setup.
Obsidian with the readitlater plugin is good, and actually stored in a standard format entirely on your devices, so truly offline.
Why would you need a saas solution if it’s for offline reading? Seems like a contradiction
…so that you can read it on a device other than the one you’ve initially opened the link on? I can save a link to Wallabag from my laptop’s browser at home, have my e-reader sync it, and then read it offline while on a train.
what OS does your ereader run? can it run syncthing? can it open HTML?
it’s a jailbroken Paperwhite, so I could look into setting up a Syncthing KOReader plugin, but my current setup works perfectly fine for me.
oh, I realized you have been using wallabag nowadays. but syncthing, plus pages saved with the singlefile or the webscrapbook addon could work fine
Pocket always saved the page as both the regular website and a converted article view.
How does all this compare with something like Goodlinks?
well, for starters I can’t install Goodlinks on Linux, Android, or a jailbroken Kindle.
Gotcha
I have ended up using Zotero for this, which takes a snapshot of the webpage for offline reading (and preservation). Synced to other clients through my WebDAV server. Originally only used Zotero as a reference manager for academic journal papers, but liked using it more broadly.
I’ve heard good things about karakeep (also requires self hosting) github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
I have, and if you need an SaaS for that, I am sorry for you. Pocket was great for getting around paywalls for a while.
I hear you. I discovered Omnivore and was in the process of migrating from Pocket to it until less than a year later Omnivore was gone.
Same. I’ve done pocket and omnivore but now both dead :(
Check out LinkedIn for this
Edit: multiple days later… Linkwarden not linkedin…
if you happen to be an apple person Safari’s Reading List can save pages offline.
Nice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things
The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.
Serious question. Do people generally use vertical tabs? I work in IT and have seen countless people’s screens and browsers in all my years, and not one was using vertical tabs (though one put their start menu at the top).
i have seen a few do it. i don’t get it either.
I use vertical tabs because horizontal tabs use more screen in wide aspect ratios (16:9 or greater) and I want to optimize my screen usage for the actual content, rather than the tabs.
I’ve switched my setup to vertical tabs (without groups), and I like it quite a lot. It was a bit of a shock to the muscle memory at first, but now I very much prefer this
I use them. My screen has much more horizontal real estate than vertical.
Good. I’ve been disabling this shit in about:config for one decade too many.
Well no one likes or asked for pocket as far as I know so good riddance.
Well, now you know otherwise. I use it daily.
Oh fuck the Kobo reader suddenly became more useless now.
They’re likely moving to focus on Thundermail.com, VPN, calendar, private cloud storage, etc… Like Proton Mail does.
Why don’t they just open it up to let people run their own Pocket services? The usual “proprietary code” excuses make no sense for an organization like Mozilla and it’s being end of lifed anyway. Just dump it on a repo somewhere and let people hack on it if they want to. Why isn’t this part of the sunsetting plan?
code has been open for about 10 years. it was a binary blob to begin with but nowadays it’s all here
Fair enough, last I heard it wasn’t, and they certainly continue to talk like it isn’t. It feels like maybe the shutdown post might’ve been a good place to try to spread some awareness of this fact as it might be something people losing access to the service might be interested in.
i mean the main reason they don’t really advertise it as being self-hostable is the social aspect. the recommendation part doesn’t work if everyone is on their own instance. not that i know anyone that uses the recommendations. it looks like that’s the only thing they’ll keep running though…
So what you’re saying is that somebody needs to integrate it into the Fediverse.
personally i couldn’t care less about the social features of a bookmarking service.
Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.
This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.
I used to use it before it got acquired by Firefox to store my read it later list.
they’re focusing on AI instead, it seems
was fakespot ever available outside the us?
Shutting down two things that had no business being built in their browser, to replace them with more stuff that have no business being built in their browser.
Mozilla really embraced the “corporation must corporate” motto.
what stuff do you mean? I mean, certainly not vertical tabs because they are useful, lots of firefox users like it. not me, but the world does not revolve around me, so…
I love vertical tabs!!!
if we have so many tabs that their title is too narrow anyway, why not just have vertical tabs?
you know what, maybe I should give it a go too
I’ll grant you vertical tabs. Unfortunately, the new focus of Mozilla is AI everywhere and advertisement, so I’m mildly concerned.
Mozilla shouldn’t have bought FakeSpot
Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!
I use Pocket since before Mozilla bought it. In combination with my kobo ereader, it changed the way I read the Internet for the better. Self hosting is no option for me and as far as I know Pocket was the best free read-it-later service. And the only one that worked seamless with Kobo. I really hope Rakuten buys it.
why do you think they won’t enshittify it? they own viber, see what they did there. ads all over the app, some in channels you can’t disable. once it asked me about the data collection I allow, I had to manually disable it with dozens of toggles for all their “business partners”, and it took at least half an hour.
I don’t know what viber is. I also don’t think they won’t enshittify it. I just hope to buy more time until a similar service or technology appears.
The fuck is a “read it later” service? Bookmarks?
It’s significantly more accessible than trying to sync bookmarks with an Ereader’s shitty browser
Can you pull up a bookmarked item to read when you don’t have an active network connection? If yes, that’s a “read it later” service. If no, then that’s why they are useful.
So saving a page.
No, because you don’t save the bullshit along with the content. Also, it is a lot more organised than saving the html.
Oh, you are missing so much…
It also stripped the webpage to make it readable and mostly distraction-free, plus some services will also include tag suggestions to more easily find it later.
I used Pocket on my Kobo to read articles I saved, much easier to focus on the content and easy on the eyes with the eInk display.
I never used Pocket itself, but I do like having the grid of news articles on the new tab page, which I believe is powered by Pocket in some shape or form. Anyone know if that feature is going away too?
It’s just a fancy history, it has nothing to do with pocket.
Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/94df05cc-8828-47c3-8ebf-552976744ee0.png">
The second slider down is your history/pinned shortcuts on the home screen. The third one is recommended junk, “Powered by Pocket.”
More info on that here, for however long this will do anyone any good:
…mozilla.org/…/pocket-recommendations-firefox-new…
Wait, I didn’t know Mozilla actually owned Pocket, I thought they just had a partnership or something…
I used to main Pocket back in the days when I had an iPod Touch 4G and older iPhone models, nowadays… It is storing articles from those days that I bet I haven’t gotten to read 😂
Man, one gets a backlog of everything these days.
I’m already on my second ‘Watch Later’ playlist on YT.
But it doesnt even remove them atomatically when you do, so when I am stuck and go there its full of things I did watch!
And double full of suff I will never.
That is why I started liking (or disliking) every single video I watch in YT, which I am honestly not a fan of as I am helping to craft the algo lol.
But at least if I see a like or dislike I know for damn good I can skip it, even if I don’t remember it…
How does a second Watch Later playlist work?
Just a playlist named “Watch Later 2” where I save videos.
Ah, so it is manual work? I mean nothing to do with YouTube handling.
Not after filling up the first one ;)
How about Firefox syncing collections between mobile and desktop? Then we wouldn’t NEED Pocket to begin with! 🤷
Uhhhh, mine does. Why doesn’t yours?
In the mobile app, tapping the three dots gets you a “save to collection” option. Where do you find it on the desktop then?
On my Android devices right below “New Tab” is an option for “Bookmarks”. I guess YMMV depending on what your mobile device is?
Welp, guess I better start up the calibre extension to send pocket articles as a file for ebook readers.
Well, I guess I’m getting the opera or Vivaldi app, whatever that browser out of Europe is called. Or is it Brave or something, I forget.
Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.
To be fair, I think they both existed as separate products first, before Mozilla bought them. I used both, but they should have never been integrated as a part of a browser…
I hated it at first but then I started to leave pocket on and click links every now and then since I figured they got revenue out of it. I don’t use it often but its a shame to see it go now that I kind of like it.
I wanted to like pocket, but I never really understood the point of it when I was already using Reddit or Google News to curate what I liked to read about. Was it more privacy oriented?
I found that articles in pocket were actually well written and didn’t make you pull your hairs out
Owning things like Pocket is fine as long as each product stands on it’s own. Melding them together is what upsets their user base.
100%. And companies don’t seem to realize this. I’ll use fakespot, but there is absolutely no use for it to be an inbrowser app, and the fact that it suggests (pushes) the idea each time I use the website is just maddening. That said, I appreciate that service.
Pocket can stay or leave. I don’t care one way or the other. I never understood its usecase.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this suggestion. IDK where I clicked “STFU” but I only ever remember seeing something about it once.
I clear cookies often, so it could be a cookie setting, maybe.
I used to use it when I was browsing the web at work. If I was reading something at the end of the day, or if it was something I didn’t want to read at work, I’d give it a pocket bookmark. Then I could pull out my phone and finish right where I left off during my train commute.
Huh. Ok, cool. I just go to the address bar and enter QR to it, which triggers some search engines to generate a qr code for the following text. I, then, scan that code to my phone, and open the page on it to read later.
I wanted to like pocket but the articles were such useless slop crap. I feel bad for writers who actually have a passion for the craft but end up sitting down and shitting out low quality popsci articles all day.
From the 404media article on the subject:
(The monkey paw turns, and) we got our wish.
We did, internet! We killed Pocket!
Everything good to halfway decent must die on the alter of cost cuts, but nevermind and never notice that they’re investing all of the savings on dubious junk like AI.
i literally JUST installed fakespot lol
As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?
Before pocket I was using instapaper, seems like it’s still around. Bit of a shame about pocket, it’s pretty useful
Never used pocket, how does this differ from just having a bookmarks folder called “stuff to read while you’re taking a shit”?
The difference is in convenience.
On the one hand, you can add a page to your bookmarks, after choosing the correct folder, of course.
On the other hand, you can click a button and a page gets automatically saved in your “read later” storage, with a description, summary, and a preview of the content.
I don’t save stuff with it but I read the articles that come up on desktop. so it’s kinda like a community, subreddit, rss feed, whatever
Pocket saved an offline searchable archive of all of the article text. Multiple times I found articles I saved that were no longer online. So no, it’s not the same as bookmarks
I use Inoreader as my RSS feed reader and it has a section to save webpages in a similar fashion.
Bookmarks can do all that already or am I missing something?
Pocket can save the content of an article without the formatting and ads, which you can then download to Pocket’s app for offline reading.
Ah thanks TIL
Synced bookmarks. You’ll be happy to learn that this is also a feature Firefox offers.
I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.
They go to different locations. The ones from mobile are in “mobile bookmarks”.
FF is technically backed by GOOGLE advert money.
My LLM says this is what’s known as a “MORAL HAZARD”
.
Taking evil Google money to make something good out of it seems fair enough.
YES! No more Pocket button sticking out like a sore thumb!
Wasn’t it possible to remove that button?
Possible: yes
Convenient: no
It’s literally in the same place as all other UI customising, though. I consider that as convenient as it gets.
“Oh no, I have to move the mouse for about 10 cm!”
with every fucking install on every machine. for years.
a waste of space and time. always has been. but did moz listen? no. because fanboys like you mock the user and give them the confidence to do stupid shit. lame CEOs, failed TB, fxa servers…geez the list of absolute wrong directions moz went is so long.
praising freedom and a decentralized internet, but store links, passwords etc on their shit american servers. the only good idea moz has was to start coding a browser…after that it just went downhill…according to the decline of users of the years. what is their market share today and why?
Multiplied by all the other annoyances you have to turn off, via either gui or
about:config, each and every time. I feel you.I hop machines fairly frequently, use multiple browsing profiles, and often create discardable profiles, so I eventually just went ahead and spent some time tracing all the
about:configequivalents of the settings that I typically change every time and then put them in auser.jsfile that I can just drop into my profile directory.…which is pretty smart. but many of my installs unfortunately include osx and even still windows. not for me, but but for work and ppl that want alternatives. and i just dont have the time for these shenanigans every time. and as much as i hate it to say: a chrome install feels cleaner. so for myself i rsync my ffprofile folder to a remote storage. but i will consider your method now. thanks.
My
user.jsfile is entirely platform independent. I use it on Linux, Windows and even used it on my work provided Macbook. FYI:user.jsonly contains the settings you want to change, it’s not the wholeprefs.jsfile. It’s just 63 lines.I agree that chrome feels cleaner and needs a lot less fiddling to get right, but chrome is effectively dead for me. I switched to firefox for much more important reasons than a few UI annoyances.
Wasn’t it in about:config? Or maybe it used to be.
Could have been back when the button was part of the address bar. But that was forever ago.
That’s what I’m thinking of them. Good on them for removing it in the meantime.
Yes, to completely turn it off, it’s an
about:configsetting:extensions.pocket.enabledRemoving it from the toolbar just hides it, but keeps it running.
?
You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/777bbf76-8ff0-476d-905d-a96a122e7f98.png">
Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.
You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.
On Firefox? I’ve used it for years and this is the first time I hear of Pocket
And then people get all pissy when Google or Microsoft show a pop-up of a new feature…
Yes, Microsoft is especially bad in this regard. For this whole spring have I clicked hundeds of times that I’m aware that my trial is ending. They also introduced a new feature that they promote on a space that takes literally half the screen. And youtube premium, oh boy.
This is… not quite related to the topic, no? Trial ending warning is not a “hey, here’s a new feature you might want to try out”.
Could you elaborate? I used to use Edge as my daily driver, now it’s my secondary browser. I have no clue what you mean here.
Not speaking of edge here, but the Microsoft fabric/power platform. They tried to sell me some feature for months and eventually i missclicked and started the trial. Now they are notifying that the trial ends in x days and they’ve been extending it so it never ends
In a world without dark design patterns, there would be a single pop-up when you first install the application, to ask if you want notifications and/or suggestions for new features. If you click “no”, it should never bother you again unless you go into a menu and opt in. Anything beyond that is inherently predatory.
Ideally, that pop-up wouldn’t even exist. They could just have a collective “don’t bother me again” checkbox on every non-essential notification, so you can easily disable it the first time they become relevant. If your user has already indicated that they are not interested, any further pestering is essentially harassment.
This is exactly how it works in things like Office or Edge.
Yup. Or unless a new feature is introduced, in which case a new pop-up appears. That’s precisely how it works.
Edge, most of the time, just opens a new tab with “Your Edge was updated” and a list of new things.
If it was about the same feature that you already dismissed - yeah, I get the sentiment. If it’s about completely new things - it’s a really weird thing to say. How are users supposed to know that something new was introduced? Sift through thousands of lines of changelogs…?
If the user has indicated that they are not interested in new features, it means they do not care about new features. They don’t want to know about them, or they prefer to find out proactively in their own time. If you still insist on ramming notifications down their throat at that point, you’re not doing it for the user. You’re doing it for yourself.
Right. And then we see comments like the one that started this thread: “whoa, there was a Pocket integration??”
It literally takes 5 seconds to remove it.
No time, need to shit post
But you can’t remove pocket from firefox just disable it. Given that it wa also a close source binary blob that made firefox not completely open source I’m glad it’s going.
Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.
Wish they’d make bookmark not suck so much that using them felt like a commitment to organisationnal chores. The bookmark system is largely unchanged since the netscape days.
You cant search texts inside bookmarks because they only store the url. Which will break. Instead of saving the html itself, as if we still only has hundreds of gigabytes.
It should have a library level search system, capable of not just symbol text but intelligent summarization, categorization, search by relecant, content discovery algorithm, rss feed support all fully local, offline capable.
The whole thing, metadata, html, inages, video, files, code, replay of the changes over time. Yes I should be able to replay clicking “read more” as I expand comments on facebook. I should not lose my work to a page reload ever again. And no that’s nor “too much space”. Web pages are largely text sent super efficiently it is not that much information even compared to a gigabyte.
What you’re describing is so much more difficult from a technical standpoint than you give it credit.
Static pages – sure, the plague of single page applications – oof, that’s a challenge.
We can save entire operating systems in that way, the heavy burden is borne by the hardware, as far as the software is concerned it is to dump the memory snapshot of the engine into a file and reload it later.
I mean, it’s been almost 30 years and this aspect hasn’t evolved because of a long expired belief that we will be able to re-download it all later as if the internet wasn’t eventually going to churn over and all links will eventually break.
Ok, so your average site doesn’t download content directly. The initial load is just the framework required to fetch and render the content dynamically.
Short of just crawling the whole site, there is no real way to know what, when or why a thing is loaded into memory.
You can’t even be sure that some pages will stay the same after every single refresh.
Comparing it to saving the state of OS isn’t fair because the state is in one place. On the machine running the code. The difference here is that the state of the website is not in control of the browser and there’s no standard way to access it in a way that would allow what you’re describing.
Now, again, saving rendered HTML is trivial, but saving the whole state of a dynamic website require a full on web crawler and then not only loading saved pages and scripts, but also emulating the servers to fetch the data rendered.
I understand a VM isn’t the same since at least it is somewhat self-contained.
But at the end of the day, a browser does end up showing you something and has a stable state waiting for your input. These stable moments are like checkpoints or snapshots that can be saved in place, the whole render engine state machine. And that can be saved at multiple times, similar to how internet archive takes periodic static snapshots of websites.
It should be trivial, a one-click action for the user to save the last couple of these checkpoint states to a format that can be consulted later and offline or after the website has gone. Whether that’s just saving “everything” it needs to recreate the machine state, or by saving only the machine state itself.
That doesn’t mean the whole website will remain interactive but it will at the very least preserve what was inside the scroll buffer of the browser
And that is a LOT better than just saving a broken link, or just saving a scrolling screenshot, which already would be an improvement over the current state of things.
It would also allow a text search of the page content of all bookmarked pages. Which would be huge since the current bookmark manager can barely search titles and very poorly at that.
The bookmarks system is long LONG due for a full overhaul
This “machine state” definition and manipulation is exactly the hard part of the concept. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a beast of a problem.
Our best current solutions are just dumb web crawler bots.
To me a simple page saving (ctrl+s) integration seems like a most realistic solution.
I mean the engine already has a full machine state. I could just run firefox inside a VM and snapshot the VM to save the website in a idle-disconnected state. So it’s a matter of doing something more sane and efficient than this
It could crawl elements within the DOM to save a word cloud of visible text for each bookmark as metadata for later searches. I think it’s doable. Separating nonvisible and visible stuff is very difficult though.
This is supported, but not integrated in bookmark lookup. I mean, if you hit ctrl+s, the browser will save currently rendered HTML. No crawling required. Hooking up some text indexing for search seems perfectly doable.
I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot. “Save Webpage” is useless nowadays because everything is loaded externally through scripts. What if it saved a timeline of requests and responses somehow and could play it back? This might require recording the entire JS state though… and so much more with browser APIs. Saving just the requests+responses as a cache would fail if the scripting was non-deterministic. Maybe it would make sense to literally save a “recording” of the HTML and CSS changes, playing back only the results of any network requests or JS?
This would be a whole new pipeline to make interactivity work. Emulating a server with cached responses would allow to reuse the JS part of websites and is easier to do. I have no doubt that some pages wouldn’t work and there would be a shitton of security considerations I can’t imagine.
Now imagine having google, bing, qwant, duck duck go and ecosia bookmarked.
You’d get a mostly empty page with a search box in the middle … and a few hundred megs of tracking software.
I liked it at first until the recommendations became more-and-more advertorial slop.
I used it like 3 times before deciding my read later functionality is already and better served by the 206 tabs I will never look at.
I enjoy pocket for the articles that come up on the new tab page. I’ve never once saved an article for later with it.
Mozilla should fire their non-technical staff, strongly make the case for how they’re fighting for a free and open internet, and use a subscription model for Firefox to pay the bills
Nobody is paying a subscription to use a browser they can get for free.
Enough internet users are familiar with the adage “if a product is free, you are the product”, through personal experience
I’d be OK with paying for Firefox if it meant that it was stripped of all association with advertisers. And presumably, if Mozilla were freed from that association, they’d be able to make a stronger case for how they’re protecting a free internet
Maybe you would. The vast vast majority wouldn’t.
Not many people care about privacy from big tech, and those that do probably know what FOSS is and would know that they can trivially get Firefox for free.
I also doubt that Mozilla could get the hundreds of millions per year that they need to maintain a modern web browser engine, keep up to date on security, etc.
This story marks the loss of another revenue stream for Mozilla. Their business is increasingly reliant on Google’s search deal for money, and if that money stops, they’ll have to face that same reckoning. For example, they won’t be able to afford paying their CEO millions of dollars a year any more.
I think they should start repositioning themselves now as an activist organisation that is fighting corporate interests trying to control the internet. If they can do that, I think a lot of people would pay to use Firefox
Patreon and Wikipedia are things people pay for that they can get for free. I have long wanted a way to directly find Firefox development and sustainability.
Wikipedia has a far wider reach, doesn’t have competitors in quite the same way Mozilla does, and needs far less money than Mozilla.
It takes hundreds of millions every year to maintain a modern web engine, have top-tier security, etc. It’s harder than maintaining an OS, even.
I just don’t see enough people getting in on that.
You mention Patreon. Alright, let’s go with that. The largest Patreon project by far earns less than $3m per year. Mozilla would need probably 150x that.
The first paragraph is not true. Mozilla is backed by a billionaire or billionaires, for example Google and Microsoft where the majority of Mozilla revenues comes from them. Stop deceiving people!
They’re not billionaires. They’re corporations.
Pocket is the sort of shit that makes me embarrassed to recommend Firefox.
funny. if you point out what sucks about moz before they tell it to their fanbase you’re banned. but after moz announced it everbody goes like yeah good decision. the user/fan base has become the top reason to not use FF.
i used pocket once, and after several steps to activate it, i realized that it was not at all what I thought it was going to be and never touched it again
fuck, I’m using the Pocket plugin a lot :[
not for bookmarking, just to mark where I was in longer videos and webcomics, 1 click on/off, easy
I hope they don’t remove Mozilla accounts too, I have all my bookmarks and sync between devices there. Zen browser that I use relies on this and I assume other browsers based off Firefox do too. Mozilla does not have a good managing team and they deserve to go down but there should be a transition period.
How can they sell your details if you don’t register for an account?
I’d personally much rather sync was done with no account. More like synching where clients connect directly to each other with a QR code (or cut&paste code)
I’d prefer a self-hosted option. They could even do it the KeePass way where it just saves to a file and you’re responsible for syncing it.
I tried pocket a couple of times but couldn’t get past the “we think you’re on a phone so you’re only getting three items on the screen at once”. Well I’m not on a phone, I’m on a desktop with a 32" monitor and three T-Rex sized items on my screen is just terrible design.
An recommendations for Pocket-Alternatives? I save articles on my phone and desktop and read on my tablet…
Instapaper is still going strong.
Apple also has Reading List built into safari and iPhone.
Wallabag and Karakeep are popular open source apps
Just started using Linkwarden, been cool so far.
As a Kobo user who sends articles to my Kobo via Pocket A LOT, this is some hefty bullshit.
Yup, just got a Kobo and absolutely love the Pocket integration… I hope some alternative is implemented…
Switched to LibreWolf after seeing the message about Fakespot. It was a heavily used browser add-on I used almost religiously since 2020. Mozilla acquired them in 2023 and then did nothing with it, letting it die. I’m so tired of this bullshit.
Is it free software?
Then anyone can make the improvements they want for it.
Good, I never used pocket and I never heard of the other thing.
Welp, I’ve taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.
Good, they should exclusively focus on Firefox.
And how they can monetize user data?
They’re going to do that regardless.
Really disappointed to lose Pocket. I am a big user of it and found it very convenient to save articles of interest as well as collecting anything that looked interesting that I might want to read. Have both the Android app and use it on the desktop.
Now I'm going to have to find a substitute.
Let us know if you find a replacement. I have pocket on my e-reader and I’m going to miss it
Perhaps Wallabag, a self-hostable service to save and categorize articles?
Also @Australis13@fedia.io and @ratzki@discuss.tchncs.de
Karakeep is another open source read it later app that is popular
Based on https://fedia.io/m/selfhosted@lemmy.world/t/2206365/Alternatives-to-MZLA-Pocket I'm going to try Wallabag and/or Readeck. Probably the critical issue is whether you can self-host or not:
I liked the concept but immediately thought “this is gonna get dropped eventually and I’ll lose all the shit I saved”. Looks like I was right.
Is there like worker-owned alternative to Mozilla ?
You can use firefox forks like librewolf or zen or something
There are other smaller browsers but there you have the tradeoff that they dont have as many devs
The company itself
The real Pocket is the Google money they made along the way.
The moment I setup an Omnivore account, it gets acquired and dies, the moment I switch to Pocket it’s dead lol, I think I’ll just move to some open source self hosted read it later app like Karakeep
No! Use your power for good! Switch to Facebook and X!
I know what I need to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it!
well shit, i loved pocket. i guess time to make my own del.icio.us social bookmarking/saving app like i’ve been wanting to for years.
I’ve been using raindrop.io for years now and highly recommend checking it out
Yeah I’ve been using pocket since it was Read It Later. I got shit in there going back about 15 years I guess I’ll be exporting and finally going through lmao.
.
yeah fair lmao
Good riddance.
These companies need to stop pushing ‘features’ nobody cares about and then complaining they need more funding.
Nobody cared to use Pocket so its not surprising, btw what was that Fakespot thing?
It tried to show how authentic a product review was
cant say if it was accurate or not
I feel like that’s a critical function lmao
Unfortunately hard to verify, plus its technically still an opinion written in code by someone.
I used fakespot a lot. It used huristics to attempt to determine how authentic a product’s reviews are. It analyzed the reviews for things like repeated phrases, odd review activity like bragading, and other things. It then gave a letter grade to the veracity of the reviews and an “adjusted” aggregate review score after removing any reviews that it considered to be suspicious.
I’m going to miss fakespot. I don’t know how accurate it was but it definitely informed my decisions.
Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.
Alternative? 11Labs Reader will let you build an article library and will read them to you with superior voicing then pocket ever had.
Is this cause of the money they lost from the google thing?
Sad news, but trimming the fat is what people wanted Mozilla to do. Anyone know a good alternative to Fakespot? I absolutely don’t trust amazon’s own review summaries, and expect other alternatives would be for-profit data harvesters.
Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.
Bummer. I can see pocket going, I tried to use it but it’s basically a place to put stuff that you plant to but never actually get around to reading, a bookmark does the same thing. Fakespot I’m not sure about. I’ve used it, but there’s no way to verify how right it is.
Pocket was silly, just use tabs and buy more RAM.
You don’t need to. Modem browsers will suspend unused tabs, cache them on drive and free up the memory, while quickly restoring as soon user activate them. On at least moderately fast systems this happens so quickly it’s hardly noticeable.
great way to run into rate limits tho
with that plus auto tab discard i can have plenty of tabs :)
The point was to have stuff to read when no connection, such as airplane. Which browser doesn’t try to refresh the tab? Any setting that allows to cache to HDD on a mobile browser you know of?
It did that? That’s nifty. Maybe a little deliberate for me, personally, with my adhd, but I can see how that would be very useful. Kind’ve a bummer that’s gone, actually. Shoot. And there are no decent and trustworthy alternatives?
Pocket goes hand in hand with procrastination.
Fakespot was what finally convinced my wife to leave chrome. Fuck these fuckers.