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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#301

Post by rhelmer »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #257
throwaway206801 wrote: post #58

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

It seems we have have been taken to a bizzaro parallel earth where people enjoy built it bloat that should be an addon in their formerly highly customizeable browser.

The Pocket integration in Firefox is very simple and is in fact a built-in add-on.

I think it's a failure of imagination to assume that this is going to be the extent of what Pocket will be able to contribute... they have a lot of users and popular mobile apps for instance which is useful on its own.

As the blog post points out, the hope is that Pocket will accelerate the context graph initiative.

So, I disagree that it's about "bloat" or customization. In any case, the Pocket add-on is like ~700k and it doesn't do anything if you take it off the toolbar...

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#302

Post by kibwen »

M_- wrote: post #284
kibwen wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people did write apps in XUL. My first IRC client and my first FTP client were both XUL apps. I'm not convinced that Electron today is any more popular than XUL was back then (aside from Atom (or VS Code, based on Atom), I can't name any programs that use Electron). Additionally, XUL uses web tech, but it is not a standard and was never intended to be a standard (not even an informal specification exists…

> I'm not convinced that Electron today is any more popular than XUL was back then comex already named two highly popular ones (slack in particular can't be overlooked) but there are more. https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-electron https://electron.atom.io/apps/ Outside of Slack, WhatsApp and Discord (see a pattern? pretty much all new chat apps are using it), I'm not sure if there's any other truly popular (am…

> Outside of Slack

Slack has a standalone app? I've only ever used the web version. What more does it do?

> Discord

Likewise, I never even realized Discord had a non-browser implementation.

> WhatsApp

I never even realized that WhatsApp had a non-mobile implementation.

> they definitely need native access to local APIs

Which ones?

> And now they are arguably failing to push it to themselves

Er, the whole point of Mozilla is to champion standards-based web tech. They're rewriting their UI using CSS/HTML/JS because this is feasible today, whereas it wasn't in 2005. So I ask again, why would Mozilla want to retain XUL instead of making web technologies more powerful?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#303

Post by no_wizard »

qbrass wrote: post #293
no_wizard wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

in my opinion, the last iteration of FFOS looked pretty good. Granted, apps were not there, no shocker. I thought they did a great job with it design wise though, and it had some neat features. I think if it was done 5 years ago it'd been a game changer for linux on the desktop.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#304

Post by no_wizard »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #289
no_wizard wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you might be describing something fairly close to ChromeOS.

Yeah, except ChromeOS is shipped with ubuntu 15.04 i think, and its heavily modified, and you don't have regular access to the greater file system, and the front end isn't really rendered out from blink/chrome, i don't believe.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#305

Post by BinaryIdiot »

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.

> My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you.

You seem to be attempting to address just the slowness of my complain and not its overall awfulness. Start-up time, loading each email; I've never seen it work very fast it always has that android-like lag throughout the entire thing. It also doesn't feel native to whatever OS you're using it in almost like using a Swing app.

The UX is just awful.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#306

Post by jacquesm »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #305
jacquesm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you. You seem to be attempting to address just the slowness of my complain and not its overall awfulness. Start-up time, loading each email; I've never seen it work very fast it always has that android-like lag throughout the entire thing. It also doesn't feel native to whatever OS you're using it in almost like using a Swing app. The UX is just awful.

Well, maybe I'm just used to it. I tried many other email clients and other than text mode ones it is the best I've found so far (Linux, Debian).

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#307

Post by jeena »

bad_user wrote: post #213
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 C…

But gmail and fastmail don't work offline.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#308

Post by jccalhoun »

r721 wrote: post #135
chrisabrams wrote: post #24

As a former del.ici.ous engineer and user, I'm happy to see that Pocket will be in good hands for a while :)

Is there any chance you know what's happening with delicious now? Their last blog post is dated "April 24, 2016" [1], and they are silent on Facebook since May 2016 too [2] despite loads of comments. [1] http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193 [2] https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205

a year or two they went down for about a week. That was the final straw for me and pushed me to pay for pinboard.in. I haven't looked back since. it just works and I don't worry about it going down or going away.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#309

Post by hobarrera »

nnethercote wrote: post #91
omouse wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pocket will be open sourced.

Is there any official source for this?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#310

Post by [deleted] »

nnethercote wrote: post #91
omouse wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pocket will be open sourced.

[deleted]
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