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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#211

Post by bttf »

threatofrain wrote: post #152
bttf wrote: post #127

I have been working on a prototype for a competitor to Pocket and other save-for-later services with an emphasis on minimalism, privacy and ease of use. https://slushi.es Very early app, features are rolling out daily. My end goal is to build a recommendation engine out of user data, while keeping things anonymous. Although social bookmarking has been done plenty times before, I think execution has been sub-par in pr…

I'd be curious to see an organization scheme other than just tags, as I suspect that it leads to difficult to trim (potentially always climbing up) bloat and cognitive load.

interesting point. tags have been a feature we have not added yet partly because they seem slightly superfluous. the user is able to search across titles, descriptions, URLs, and can curate links with lists. not sure if tags can provide any extra value

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#212

Post by chii »

shock wrote: post #196
notatoad wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, security updates are still being made. Here's the release notes for recent security fixes in thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

Are the security updates done by Mozilla itself or by the volunteers that continue Thunderbird development?

why do you care where the patches come from?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#213

Post by bad_user »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #48

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 is still under active development, I'm one of their users, being the best email client for the desktop. Unfortunately Thunderbird is also a dead end, being incompatible with Firefox's direction.

Yes, XUL is dead and Firefox is evolving into a Chrome substitute and while people have serious concerns about it, fact of the matter is that Chrome was designed for web apps and almost 9 years after its release Chrome is still the best browser available for web apps. Not sure how many people here remember Chrome's original goals, beautifully illustrated by their comic book announcement, but here's a refresher and try to count the problems that Firefox still has in 2017: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

In other words, Firefox is dying because users have been trained to expect security, stability, an interface free of crappy toolbars and extensions you can't uninstall, not to mention running long lived web apps. And while people on this forum will cry out for Vimperator or other poweruser extensions that 99.9% of the world have never heard about, it's undeniable that without evasive action Firefox will become a footnote in only a couple of years.

I'm also a Firefox user and I understand their move away from Thunderbird. For work I use Gmail, personal email is Fastmail, both have really good web interfaces. And while I try using email clients like Thunderbird, the web interfaces are simply good enough and always there. These are web apps btw and guess which browser is best for web apps? It's not Firefox ;-)

And for all I care Mozilla can kill every project they have, if that means Firefox continues to improve. Because it's still the only browser that cares about my freedoms.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#214

Post by kobayashi »

chii wrote: post #212
shock wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the security updates done by Mozilla itself or by the volunteers that continue Thunderbird development?

why do you care where the patches come from?

One might care where the patches come from as a volunteer community could be less reliable over time than the paid Mozilla staff. I know I certainly feel that way.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#215

Post by FatalBaboon »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #48

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 cannot understand the need for a thing like Pocket. Much less why Mozilla prefers to keep it close, and even less for money.

I mean, what is wrong with bookmarks and sharing links? Firefox can even send tabs to other computers I got linked via ff sync.

Iterate on a bad idea, give it a social spin, and voilà! You have a sellable startup. Except you should not buy that.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#216

Post by kbrosnan »

shock wrote: post #196
notatoad wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, security updates are still being made. Here's the release notes for recent security fixes in thunderbird: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

Are the security updates done by Mozilla itself or by the volunteers that continue Thunderbird development?

The security patches are largely from Mozilla's Gecko/SpiderMonkey/Toolkit work. The people who create the patches tend to be Mozilla employees. Looking over the 45.x Thunderbird releases I don't see a single Thunderbird specific security fix. [1]

The team that qualifies and does the release work for Thunderbird are volunteers. I believe that the builds are done on Mozilla hosted hardware.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#217

Post by Feld0 »

yuhong wrote: post #190
zobzu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really wish there was an easier way to do this, ideally something like a corporation with no shareholders.

That's exactly what a nonprofit is. Nonprofits are corporations like any other, with a few key differences:

- Instead of shareholders, nonprofits have members. Members don't own the corporation (no one does) but control it insofar that they hire-and-fire its directors.

- Memberships normally can't be sold, and nonprofits have no equivalent to dividends.

- There are stronger conflict-of-interest protections, preventing officers from signing cheques to themselves or otherwise using the corporation's resources for their personal benefit - at least without someone else's approval.

A typical setup for nonprofits is to tie memberships to being a director, so that current board members choose their own successors. This is known as a "self-perpetuating board".

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#219

Post by dunham »

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…

You could script this with a bookmarking service like pinboard.in (anything with an API) and a cron job.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#220

Post by __jal »

jlgaddis wrote: post #151
pfg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that forces me to keep Thunderbird around are mailing lists. I haven't found anything else that doesn't break quoting or messes with word/line wrapping in plaintext mails. To be fair, even Thunderbird requires quite a bit of about:config tuning to get it to behave sanely. I suppose I'll have to learn to live with mutt eventually.

IMO, mutt is the best mail client there is when it comes to lots of high-volume mailing lists. I can catch up on all my lists so much quicker than with any other mail client.

Seconded!

Mutt is the only way I can keep up with my mail volume. The only time the UI doesn't react instantly is when it loads huge mailboxes. And it still does that faster than I've seen graphical clients load the same mailbox.

Add to that pretty much infinite customization, and it does indeed suck less.

If you have to deal with large amounts of mail for pretty much whatever reason, you can do it faster with mutt than with any other client I've ever used. Yes, there is a learning curve. It isn't a vim-style learning curve, but it is there. But if you're considering a command line MUA at all, you can handle it.

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