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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

71–80 of 456 posts

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#71

I have used Pocket for the last five years or so. 99.5% of the articles I bookmark every day I never actually read. Probably should make me think why I use it at all...

This is why I created a IFTTT action to add the item to todoist if I have given it a tag ('read', in my case).

This way I can go back and read the articles that I really care about, while still saving low priority stuff that I only go through when I'm bored.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#73
post #66

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mo…

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money. That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to. At the end of the day, it's othe…

You can see that just by looking at their job postings. The experimental ads team was hiring and then stopped and then the team was absorbed into other teams. Now they have more postings for project managers. They're basically introducing more hierarchy and traditional corp. stuff from the sounds of it.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#74
Pocket, for me, is a weird product/feature. I've tried to use it, but it ends up just being like a clumsy bookmarking feature.

Allegedly, you can read things offline, but that feature never works for me. It seems the feature for offline reading doesn't exist at all in Firefox (which I'd assumed was the point of its integration, but my assumption was wrong), and I've tried the Chrome desktop app and the Android mobile app ..nothing I save to pocket is ever readable without a data connection. It must work for some content for some people because I see people talking about it like it does. But, without that feature I see literally no utility in Pocket...it's just a clunky bolted-on bookmark manager, and so I end up going back to bookmarks with tags. I use Sync and I have Firefox on all of my devices. So, my bookmarks go with me.

So, I guess it's good that it's going open source. I wasn't comfortable with the way integration was presented back when they added it...it wasn't at all apparent, to me, that Pocket was a third party for-profit entity when the "setup your pocket" process launched in Firefox, since I'd never heard of it before that. But, it still seems like a solution looking for a problem. I'll give it another look. Maybe I was just unlucky with my choices of what to save...but it seems like if offline reading is not going to work on a page (for whatever reason) it should warn you. It'd suck to get on a train/plane or get lost in the woods, with plans to catch up on some reading, only to find there's nothing there.

But, maybe that's not even the primary purpose of Pocket? I dunno, it's still pretty fuzzy to me wtf it's for, if not that.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#75
post #57

Oh, what a twist! In a story that began two years ago with Pocket's integration by Mozilla [1] in Firefox [2], large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism. This, at first blush, appears unrelated: Mozilla previously announced its Context Graph initiative, which was a bold undertaking to be built partially upon a new and emerging set of W3C standards to take back some of the control over linkage,…

My only problem with Pocket was that it was proprietary and it was integrated with Firefox. If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be glad to have it integrated.

Pocket makes Mozilla competitive on mobile because Firefox's market share on mobile is very low.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I thought pocket was actually one of the Mozilla sponsors, given the default installation in Firefox.

It was stated several times that Mozilla didn't get any money from Pocket for the integration.

That much is unclear. http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/05/mozilla-has-a-revenue-share...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#79

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mo…

I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excludin…

> the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs.

No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML.

It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions.

The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API.

Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others.

Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#80
"We believe that the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content is key to keeping the internet healthy by fighting against the rising tide of centralization and walled gardens" that alone is a reason to welcome this aquisition. Facebook has become for many, me included the entry point to the web much more so than the browser and I really don't like that. I can imagine Mozilla suggest content to users based in what they have saved in the past on pocket and integration with Firefox. Nice move.
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