Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 456 posts

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#441

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #322
FatalBaboon wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bookmarks-management sucks. Pocket provides multi-platform access. And multi-browser access -- doesn't matter if I'm on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, whatevs, I can pull up Pocket. Pocket strips all of today's utterly fucked, utterly useless, utterly counterproductive Web design. I cannot emphasize too much: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Offline reading. Pocket articles (via app) can be rea…

The "I'll get to that" point: * Pocket reports absolutely no user stats. * I've got no counts of tags, articles, read articles, time read, most-read, etc., etc., etc.

This desperately needs adding to the UI and tools.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#442

Post by throwaway7767 »

aluhut wrote: post #369
Certhas wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Thunderbird on MacOs and on Linux. On Linux its a fine email client, no complaints at all. On Mac it's a pile of shit that randomly hangs for 10+ seconds (and eats my battery) because I have a combined inbox. There's a bunch of config tweaks that are supposed to help but so far they haven't.

I wasn't even aware it had a Mac version but since you and me had no problems with it on X and I have no problems with it on Win, are all those complainers Apple users and should that undermine the otherwise good product? I don't think so.

My experience using thunderbird on linux is that it's a decent mail client, but I've found it corrupts its search index every few months. Rebuilding the index with my mailbox takes several days.

Also, sometimes it'll just not find certain messages. That also means it's time to clear out and rebuild indexes.

This has been my experience every time I use thunderbird, over many years. I'm not sure what it is about my mailbox that makes me see these issues when others don't.

It's a good program but could use some maintenance loving.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#443

Post by eriknstr »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #232
talklittle wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, if that article is true then not only were Mozilla [indirectly] taking money for the integrations but they also lied to us all about it. Is there corroboration that Mozilla had/has revenue sharing with Pocket and Telefonica? I've always trusted Mozilla, this suggests that trust has been badly misplaced. I can't help but feel that I'm being suckered somewhere here - who from Mozilla is benefiting personally out o…

Where did Mozilla say that they didn't have revenue sharing with those?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#444

Post by cat199 »

webwanderings wrote: post #246
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.

I recently downloaded TB to move some offline mbox emails of large quantity. TB became increasingly slow processing few thousand. I downloaded Opera Mail to do the same exact work. I was done within few hours. I have a need for more people to repeat the same process. There's zero chance I'll be asking them to download TB.

TB by default saves 1x file per folder (e.g. MBox like) -

This means depending on your storage configuration and how you use folders, potentially writing 100MB, 1G, 10G, etc. back to disk on folder content change.

For batch processing though, I use the CLI tools - thunderbird is view/compose only (procmail/formail/archivemail/offlineimap,etc)

I was hitting performance probs on bigger folders, and setup some more strict archiving to archive older mails to subfolders/zap offline using an 'archivemail' job, etc, and the problem went away, with TB being quite snappy.

as I understand it there was some effort to support 1-file-per-email, which might be an option now, but this has it's problems too.

Outlook has it's PST corruption hell...

Basically, in my opinion, email is a pain, each client shows it differently, though I am admittedly not up to speed on Opera Mail.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#445

Post by stymaar »

tertius wrote: post #424
stymaar wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's the user's prerogative to build and use tools to circumvent artificial[1] limitations. [1]: reminder: technically, streaming isn't different from download, what your computer does when watching a video in streaming is downloading . Forcing users to delete the video they have downloaded (which is exactly what's happening with streaming) so they pay the premium service for off-line use, is not a legitimate way…

> is not a legitimate way to do business. You're not the arbiter of this. > but people who don't want to pay aren't doing anything wrong. Not wanting to pay isn't wrong. Circumventing the Youtube's restrictions is though.

> Circumventing the Youtube's restrictions is though.

That's exactly my point: it's not.

It may be bad for Youtube's business, but it's not morally wrong. We owe nothing to Google.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#446

Post by ajasmin »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #158
Roritharr wrote: post #122

After this, why should I donate to Mozilla? I really don't get what's the difference between donating to Mozilla and donating to Facebook. Facebook open-sources some of their stuff. Facebook buys companies to generate revenues... I guess Mozilla doesn't need help anymore.

I don't understand your point. Are you upset they bought Pocket?

Mozilla's donation page says: We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate.

I don't know the ins and out of Mozilla dual identity as a foundation/corporation. But it'd be unsettling to learn that part of your donations to an open-source project is financing a corporate acquisition.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#447

Post by dualogy »

zzzeek wrote: post #418
johnchristopher wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not postbox ?

never heard of it, looked at "Download", saw a big apple and a big window, no penguin. fail. also closed source AFAICT. thunderbird would be an incredible email app if only it had better maintenance.

Well it does the job already, working just fine for the 31-years-old IMAP protocol, the 33-years-old POP protocol, the 18-years-old RSS protocol, etc.. I might like an "incredible" email app but all I really need is a "sufficiently solid" one.. =)

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#448

Post by kobayashi »

raesene6 wrote: post #409
kobayashi wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. I appreciate the values for which Mozilla stands, and those values are entrenched in their products.

So you're looking for an organisation who will use non-free employees to give you a product for free?

I really don't see your point.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#449

Post by JustARandomGuy »

rhelmer wrote: post #155
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.

The client-side portion of Pocket has always been open-source. If you mean the server-side then fair enough, maybe this acquisition will help with that.

Submitting links to Pocket is open source and has always been well documented, but other client-side portions of Pocket have always been closed, such as the Article View API. [1]

It would be great to have access to article view to build other clients, such as a Linux client.

1: https://getpocket.com/developer/docs/v3/article-view

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#450

Post by slrz »

rhelmer wrote: post #288
Esau wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like bloat in web browsers because, often, if just adds features best left as an add-on. Also, in something as important as a web browser, I feel a smaller codebase is wise from a security point-of-view.

I agree in principle, although in practice allowing Firefox add-ons to be fully equivalent to other features has been a detriment to security, stability and performance - hence the switch to WebExtensions (which rely on stable APIs purposely exposed by Firefox). Having the codebase be as small as possible is a laudable goal - with browsers it is difficult since Web standards are fairly complex on their own, and being…

I agree in principle, although in practice allowing Firefox add-ons to be fully equivalent to other features has been a detriment to security, stability and performance

Only in an abstract "we might have been able to implement security/performance improvements faster if we wouldn't have had to worry about breaking addons" sense. Any other effects are restricted to those people actually using the addon and don't affect everyone else.

A powerful extension interface can also be used to improve performance/stability: while e.g. adblocking certainly doesn't come for free, its cost should be more than offset by not running all that crappy code pulled from ad networks.

Post reply on HN