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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#391

Post by echelon »

mewse-hn wrote: post #386
jonwinstanley wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, Google pay for the searches passed on by the browser. So as long as they have users, they’ll get paid.

The DoJ is arguing in court that Google should be barred from paying off Mozilla because of Google's search monopoly https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...

That's so hilariously backwards.

Google should be split into several business units [1], should be forced to give up Chrome [2], and should be forced to invest several billion of its war chest into competitors.

That's what the DOJ would do if it still had balls.

The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane. It's absolutely bonkers. There is so much value in it, yet everybody's favorite mega monopoly is pouring value into commoditizing everything to keep eyeballs and attention and dollars and a taxation regime the size of a medium-sized country in its gravitational singularity.

Google is an invasive species in every market. We need the EU/DOJ/BRICS equivalent of Chicxulub-level regulation to end its throat-grip predation on everyone.

[1] Six "Baby Bells", or "Tiny Googs": Search, Android, Deepmind, Cloud, YouTube, Ads. Shuffle everything else into another bin or spin it off independently. Waymo, etc.

[2] You could put Google with the Ads business as there is (1) no synergy between ChromeAndroidSearch anymore, and (2) if Ads fucks it up, it doesn't kill the broader browser market or web ecosystem.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#392

Post by aspenmayer »

podgietaru wrote: post #259

While the Kobo app is still available an alternative might be: Self-Host Omnivore: https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/blob/main/self-host... Use this proxy to point to the Self-Hosted instance to pull from Omnivore Instead. https://github.com/Podginator/KoboOmnivoreConverter This is what I've been doing for a year or so now. I hope they don't remove the Kobo integration code from my Kobo.

Isn’t Omnivore discontinued? I didn’t hear what happened when they joined ElevenLabs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41985118

Apparently the community is trying to shape the project into a workable self-hosted state. Ironic post from two months ago about a user trying to migrate away from Pocket to Omnivore:

https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4550

Same community users provide crowdsourced list of open source alternatives to Omnivore:

https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore/issues/4462

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#393

Post by gxqoz »

bayindirh wrote: post #287
segphault wrote: post #71

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for re…

I have another theory, actually. I'm also a very old user, since the first days of the service, and I don't know how many saves I have it inside (will see when my export arrives). The latest iteration's search was abysmal , and I normally refrain from using strong words. It failed to find exact matches from titles, the words or excerpts I know that exist in the article I'm searching for, and as a result, it became a…

Yeah I have 32k saves and hit the same problems with search being extremely unreliable. About 5 years ago quotes stopped working in search. Trying to find "The Grapes of Wrath" would return all instances of "of" and "the." You could sort of hack it by searching for the most distinct word (maybe "Grapes") if you already knew exactly what you were searching for. I long suspected there was some architectural change they made on the backend that broke this and they didn't want to admit in support articles. Perhaps the Mozilla legal department determined that having a text copy of all articles in their database was some legal risk and they moved to just having the URL and maybe the title (this would also explain why "permanent copies" disappeared).

Anyway, as the 32k articles indicate, I was a power user of Pocket so part of me is sad it's going away. But they've really been checked out since maybe 2019 with regards to any real support for this product.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#394

Post by jonahx »

kepano wrote: post #272

I built Obsidian Web Clipper (open source, MIT) to replace my read-it-later app and save everything to local markdown files. Now that Obsidian Bases is available, it makes for a very nice web archival tool and reading experience. Here's a video: https://mastodon.social/@kepano/114553164915046938 You can use Web Clipper with any app that supports Markdown, not just Obsidian. Defuddle is the underlying HTML-to-Markdown…

This is very cool.

The thing I really want is this, combined with some automated local background LLM training / rag (not sure what the right approach is) process. So that, at the end of the day, everything I bookmark get saved locally, can be read in a nice format like you have the video, and be semantically queried, and it's all local:

"What was that article I saw read 1-3 months ago some new type of LLM training?"

"Find that really nice explanation of determinants article"

etc...

Have you investigated anything like that?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#395

Post by cptskippy »

kstrauser wrote: post #349
Lutger wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise. For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will bas…

Have you forgotten Apple and WebKit?

Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#396

Post by EasyMark »

no_wizard wrote: post #295
pjmlp wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform. Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

The real death knell is that Microsoft decided not to go with Mozilla in building the relaunched version of Edge. That would have been a very fruitful relationship, but they couldn't make it work. My understanding is - albeit its second hand - that they really didn't want to simply jump to Chromium, but Firefox proved far more complicated to do what they wanted to do. Ultimately, Microsoft Edge went from a pretty goo…

I really really wish they would have gone with webkit, even though they could have with some effort used gecko. Just giving up and going blink engine is awful for diversity in browser engines. I don't have much hope for efforts like ladybird, as they're just too small and browsers are a huge ecosystem now.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#397

Post by Arrowmaster »

fuzztester wrote: post #346
Lutger wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise. For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will bas…

what happened to opera? i used it a good amount earlier, when it was relatively new, but then some issues happened, which I don't remember clearly, then i stopped tracking it.

If you want old Opera look into Vivaldi. It's run by old staff from Opera pre sale.

Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#398

Post by EasyMark »

criddell wrote: post #267
pjmlp wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is the only reason we don't rename (yet) Web as ChromeOS development platform. Thanks everyone, especially all those Electron crap apps.

I think once Apple is forced to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone and iPad, Chrome/Chromium will have won the browser wars. At least Google is a better steward of their browser than Microsoft was with IE6.

That's not going to happen in the USA. at least not in the next several years. I think as long as that's true Safari dominance on iOS will continue.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#399

Post by shiomiru »

somethingor wrote: post #152
segphault wrote: post #71

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for re…

> every other browser You can just say Chromium

I was curious what "view transitions" are even about: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-view-transitions-1/

It's yet another 2.8k line specification solely authored by Google employees, introducing a brand new complexity monster (clones of ghost elements represented as a pseudo-element tree) to... make it easier to add fancy animations.

Now what I really miss is a "disable CSS animations" button. I find them very distracting and an unnecessary burden on battery life.

Re: Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

#400

Post by strangescript »

segphault wrote: post #71

I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for re…

If you look at their finances you will realize that there is nothing left in that company.
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