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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#291

Post by criddell »

flukus wrote: post #260
notatoad wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket. I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change . There is an email client that you like, as is, a…

Spoken like a manager. Something is either being actively developed or it's dieing, there is no in between with software, there is no finished state.

Does being maintained count as being actively developed? I think it should. As long as Thunderbird gets security patches, and maybe even the occasional bug fix, I'm happy with it.

I wish more pieces of software would get to the finished state and would slip into maintenance mode.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#292

Post by cgag »

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 was pretty shocked when I learned they had more than 1000 employees.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#293

Post by qbrass »

no_wizard wrote: post #276
mbel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(

I know this might sound insane to everyone, just hear me out. I always thought Mozilla should have built a Linux distribution (or rather, forked debian like everyone else ha!) and implemented their Firefox UI kit (Gecko right? I'm not as familiar.) and made a Front end for it that was smooth and easy to build apps for using web technologies, but could still run native *nix apps via debion packages. I believe that now…

They tried that for mobile devices and failed. I doubt they'd have done any better on the desktop.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#294

Post by rhelmer »

gcp wrote: post #25
mi100hael wrote: post #14

> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. ...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?

It has a huge user-base, so we can disagree on crappy. And obviously the latter part is fixable. Pocket was originally a Firefox add-on.

The built-in version is too: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/exten...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#295

Post by rhelmer »

manigandham wrote: post #171

This will give them plenty of data for their ad network, which is a nice strategic move. They always claimed to be privacy conscious so this is perhaps a nicer way to get interest and behavior information.

I'm not sure which ad network you mean - there was an effort to serve ads on the new-tab "tiles" page but that was shut down a little over a year ago: https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advanci...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#296

Post by callahad »

ttam wrote: post #239

Dear Mozilla, I'd love to help out with Pocket. As a concerned user, I even wrote this a few months ago http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html How can I apply?

Pocket is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, so Pocket retains a great deal of autonomy within their organization. Since Mozilla acquired the entire team, I'd start by reaching out to the individuals listed on https://getpocket.com/about/.

Longer term, my understanding is that we want to use Pocket's expertise and data to help build a recommendation engine for the open Web (Context Graph: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph). This speaks directly to the problem of sites like Instagram which restrict links to external sites: users can enter via URLs, but they can't navigate away. (More reading: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blo...). If anything could help users route themselves out of these silos, it'd be a huge win for the openness of the Web.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#297

Post by flukus »

criddell wrote: post #291
flukus wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a manager. Something is either being actively developed or it's dieing, there is no in between with software, there is no finished state.

Does being maintained count as being actively developed? I think it should. As long as Thunderbird gets security patches, and maybe even the occasional bug fix, I'm happy with it. I wish more pieces of software would get to the finished state and would slip into maintenance mode.

Probably not. Developers are fickle and few like to do maintenance only work. So even if it's still getting security patches they are likely to be losing the institutional knowledge to continue that in future, not to mention keeping up with things like API changes for gmail integration.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#298

Post by lizzard »

jacquesm wrote: post #142
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow, horrible application that I've tried again and again. I'm all for them killing it.

My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you. I've yet to find a client that works as well as Thunderbird with my massive email archive. Why would it be slow? I can only type so fast and sending/receiving mail is mostly dependent on the connectivity, not on the software.

Thunderbird searches can be quite slow.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#299

Post by rhelmer »

throwaway206801 wrote: post #58

Mozilla can spend money on this, but not Thunderbird or XUL-based extensions?

It's more a question of "won't" rather than "can't".

Why do you think XUL and Thunderbird are good investments vs. things like Servo or the context graph initiative (which the Pocket team is going to accelerate according to the blog post)?

Do you think a non-standard framework for making fat native apps and a mail client built on this framework are going to make Mozilla more relevant?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#300

Post by rhelmer »

rhelmer wrote: post #299
throwaway206801 wrote: post #58

Mozilla can spend money on this, but not Thunderbird or XUL-based extensions?

It's more a question of "won't" rather than "can't". Why do you think XUL and Thunderbird are good investments vs. things like Servo or the context graph initiative (which the Pocket team is going to accelerate according to the blog post)? Do you think a non-standard framework for making fat native apps and a mail client built on this framework are going to make Mozilla more relevant?

The reason I bring up Servo is that parts of it are already starting to land in Gecko and will ship with Firefox soon - do you think making Servo support XUL is a good use of anyone's time?
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