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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#81

Post by wirddin »

apetresc wrote: post #32

Something I've always wished Pocket would do is download an offline copy of videos I add to the list (using, say, youtube-dl [1]), so I can watch them on the subway, etc. But they never did this, presumably either for legal reasons, or because it was a giant waste of bandwidth considering a huge percentage of Pocketed articles never get read. Now that Mozilla is promising to open-source this, I eagerly await adding t…

This problem got solved when YouTube started allowing offline videos. Idk if it is available in your country, but in India you don't need to be a paying customer to save offline videos.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#83

Post by sharkbot »

SwellJoe wrote: post #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…

The Kobo ereaders have had Pocket integration for a while now, and it works great offline. My usual routine is to find interesting articles on Hacker News, and if they are longer than a page or two, click the Pocket button and read them at home on the ereader. A few don't render well (the article on Arrival/Story of your Life not being a time-travel story was a recent fail), but generally it works great.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#84

Post by mwcampbell »

M_- wrote: post #79
Manishearth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. But people generally aren't interested in those anymore. At least HTML and the rest of the web stack work OK on mobile platforms.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#85

Post by yellowapple »

gcp wrote: post #30
thomasahle wrote: post #17

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.

At the time, this was the most baffling aspect to me; it would've been more understandable if Pocket were paying Mozilla for the preinstall, but Mozilla opting to corrupt their own ideals of an open web without any monetary gain was mind-boggling.

Now it makes at least some sense.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#86

Post by apetresc »

tertius wrote: post #60
apetresc wrote: post #32

Something I've always wished Pocket would do is download an offline copy of videos I add to the list (using, say, youtube-dl [1]), so I can watch them on the subway, etc. But they never did this, presumably either for legal reasons, or because it was a giant waste of bandwidth considering a huge percentage of Pocketed articles never get read. Now that Mozilla is promising to open-source this, I eagerly await adding t…

See Youtube red.

My conscience is assuaged by the fact that I am already paying for Google Play Music, which would include YouTube Red at no additional cost, if I lived a few miles away on the other side of the Canada-USA border.

And anyway, despite the name, youtube-dl supports a whole lot more than just YouTube.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#87

Post by AJRF »

I was wishing Pocket would offer AWS Polly playback for articles, so I started making my own app to do it. Now that it is going open source I might just piggy back their parser as its a good bit better than mine.

Hope they build in some Context Graph projects into Pocket, as there is some great ideas their.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#88

Post by enobrev »

philfrasty wrote: post #21

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...

I see Pocket as the place where I put incredibly interesting things that I will never see again. I absolutely love Pocket and I have So Many interesting things in there. But I never look.

I started putting things in Google Inbox, and I found that I like the reminders to read things - but I don't look at those either. I just keep pushing them back, and eventually, during a less busy week, move them over to Pocket, where I can truly stop reading them.

One day, years from now, I'll read everything I've put into pocket over the years and finally understand the universe.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#89

Post by yellowapple »

derefr wrote: post #44
datatan wrote: post #5

So much for my hopes of them removing it from Firefox. Uhg.

What is the resistance to having it in at this point? Every browser has a cloud-backed page snapshot feature.

My own reason for disliking it was that it's a closed-source piece of an otherwise-FOSS browser. Hopefully this acquisition means a change for the better on that front.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#90

Post by morganvachon »

dochtman wrote: post #82

I'll keep saying that Mozilla should acquire Fastmail. Now that would be a strategic acquisition.

Please, no. I think part of the reason Fastmail has been able to focus on the user experience is because they are independent. I don't want them acquired, disbanded, and dumped. It's the best paid service I've ever used.
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